


Heroes

by Overlithe



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Action/Adventure, Body Worship, BuckyCap - Freeform, Canon-Typical Violence, Established Relationship, Gentle Sex, Hand Jobs, M/M, Marvel Universe Big Bang 2015, Mutual Caretaking, Oral Sex, Romance, Slice of Life, falcap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-15
Updated: 2015-12-12
Packaged: 2018-05-01 19:30:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 29,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5217992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Overlithe/pseuds/Overlithe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s their first day off in a month and after an exhausting mission all Sam wanted to do was to stay home instead of being dragged by Bucky on a tour of DC’s touristic highlights. But a superhero’s work is never done, especially not when there’s explosions, problems you can’t punch, and a screening of the Greatest Film of All Time.</p>
<p>A slice-of-costumed-hero-life story about loss and hope, the past and the future, and killer bird gifs. (Set a few years after TWS & CA:CW and featuring BuckyCap and FalCap. Also, they make out while in costume, which I feel is the most important part of this summary.)</p>
<p>Written for Marvel Big Bang 2015, wonderful accompanying artwork by <strong>ensign_c</strong> <a href="http://ensign-c.livejournal.com/1184.html">here</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> First of all, many thanks to **ensign_c** for picking my fic to illustrate and for creating such wonderful art to accompany it. I had a lot of fun working with her on this Big Bang and her very kind comments on my fic made working on this story all the more enjoyable and worthwhile. I hope you’ll love her gorgeous artwork every bit as much I do. Many thanks too to my beta A for all her invaluable work, and to **gloria_scott** for being incredibly helpful with all DC-related matters in the story. Any remaining mistakes are entirely my own. Finally, a big thank you to the **marvel_bang** mods for all the work they put into organising this year’s challenge.
> 
> Please note that while none of the standard warnings apply to this fic, the story does reference some serious topics (basically what you’d expect with these characters). However these are all handled in a PG-13 way, and the rating is purely for (100% loving and consensual) sexual content.
> 
> On another note, the International Spy Museum is a real place and I’ve tried to be accurate with regards to the layout of its exhibits. However, everything else about it in this story is purely my own invention. The Baltimore Children’s Hospital is completely fictitious, but its location is borrowed from the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center. For the purposes of this story, I’ve assumed that the Redwing drone in the MCU is roughly the size of actual-psychic-bonded-falcon!Redwing.
> 
> The [_Birdemic_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birdemic:_Shock_and_Terror) films are very real, as is my completely unironic love for them. Sadly, as of this writing there is yet to be a third entry in the series.

  
[ ](http://ensign-c.livejournal.com/1184.html)  


[ ](http://ensign-c.livejournal.com/1184.html)

_[Story banners by ensign_c (click to go to the art post)](http://ensign-c.livejournal.com/1184.html)_

** Heroes **

**1.**

This high up, the air was almost too thin to breathe. Frost coated his wings, rimmed his goggles. He dove into the cloud bank, where his HMD filled with mist and the electronics fizzled with static.

_I can see it._

_What?_

_I see it._ He was holding something. He was holding a man by the straps on his shoulders. The man turned his head up. _You can drop me._

_Buck?_

_Drop me._ No, that wasn’t...

_Hey._

_Hey._

‘Hey.’

Something nudged his side. His eyes were closed but light still seeped in.

That was wrong. The sticky tiredness in his muscles and the fuzz inside his head said two a.m. Half-two, tops. He stirred a little. His ears said there were birds screaming hate at the sun. Also wrong. Two senses feeding him bullshit.

‘Hey,’ the voice said again, feather-soft. The something on his side moved to his shoulder. ‘Up ‘n at ‘em, sleepyhead.’

‘Go ‘way,’ he muttered. He had to burrow back into the dream. If there was any justice in the world, it had been wonderful.

‘Time to get out of bed.’ The sing-song tone and the hand stroking his neck were so familiar that even the parts of him that would be on high alert at a supermarket checkout were quiet.

An ice-cold metal hand felt up the small of his back, fingers under his waistband.

‘Christ, I’m up! I’m _up_!’

Sam scrambled up like a soaked cat and opened his eyes in time to see Bucky settling on the side of the bed, grinning the kind of grin that let Sam know he was considering sticking his tongue out.

‘You know,’ Sam said as he rubbed his eyes, ‘sometimes you can be a real dick.’ His tongue felt furry, as though he was hungover but without even the satisfaction of having been drunk.

Bucky just kept on grinning. He was wearing workout clothes and his skin was already covered in a light sheen of sweat.

‘What time is it?’

‘Practically half six,’ Bucky said, sounding like he could dash out of the house and run a marathon. Last night, after the debriefing, they’d arrived home at a quarter to two, and Sam had tumbled into bed sticky with sleep and frayed with exhaustion.

God, sometimes he really hated super-soldiers.

‘Wow, thank god you woke me up.’ He bit back a yawn. ‘You realise this is our first day off in almost a month, right?’

Bucky riffled through one of the bedside drawers with his flesh hand. ‘You bet I do. Got everything planned, too.’

‘Uh-uh. I know your plans. They—’ Sam let out a short hiss of pain. He’d forgotten about his still-healing rib when he’d shifted up on the bed and the motion had just sent a hot dart through his chest.

Bucky’s grin faded. ‘You OK?’

‘It’s nothing.’ Sam rubbed the right side of his chest, even knowing that wouldn’t help much. He’d cracked a rib and badly bruised three others falling two storeys through plated glass four weeks ago. Bucky had been shot twice and fallen down five flights of concrete steps. He’d walked it off. ‘Just moved too quick.’

Bucky wadded up the glove he’d fished from the drawer and shifted on the edge of the mattress. ‘I’ll go grab your pills.’

‘It’s no big deal.’ Sam laid a hand on Bucky’s thigh. ‘Really.’

‘You kept tossing and turning. And let me tell you, pal, your elbows sure are pointy.’ It was a joke, but sparkless, and Bucky’s tone was quieter than usual. His right hand dropped down to where Sam’s was. Fingers brushed fingers.

Sam nudged Bucky’s thumb with his. ‘Just a dream.’

Bucky said nothing.

‘You were there, so,’ Sam added. Bucky’s mouth twitched, but still he said nothing, just remained on the side of the bed, his knuckles touching Sam’s. In the washed-out light the plates of his metal arm looked like sharp, polished ice, and Sam knew it was strong enough to rip out—

_wings_

—doors and crumple up steel. That Bucky could drop-kick a grown man fifty yards and get a perfect shot from half a mile away with a shitty scope and halfway to bleeding out. Right now there was only his quietness, the set of his mouth, the warm skin realer than any weak-ass dream cobwebs.

Life sure worked out funny sometimes.

‘Mission dream,’ he said, even though he knew Bucky wouldn’t ask. They’d returned home last night from chasing the trail of some black-market Pym Particles to the Balkans. ‘What a waste of—damn, was it three whole hours?’

‘Well, you better get back to ground, flyboy. I’m making us breakfast.’ He grinned, lopsided, but it faded quickly, and he lowered his eyes. Sam ran his thumb over the side of Bucky’s hand. He wouldn’t ask either.

‘That better be breakfast in bed, otherwise this is the worst day off ev—’ Bucky lobbed a pillow at his head and loped out of the room.

‘It’s waffles and eggs,’ Bucky added as he vanished down the corridor.

‘I hope you’re not thinking of using your metal hand as a spatula,’ Sam yelled towards the kitchen.

‘Just for that, you’re getting cold toast,’ Bucky yelled back.

Sam slumped back down on the pillows, his chest cooling, a rusty line of pain coiled under the skin of his torso. His hand picked up his phone from the nightstand ( _borderline stereotypy at this point, dude_ , his brain said, and was promptly ignored). No messages, no missed calls, just _6:28_ and _September 18_ over a black-and-white wallpaper of a cityscape at night, all steel and glass and neon streaks.

He’d never needed a calendar to know the date, though. The change in the seasons was enough: the edge of coolness in the air after the baking heat of summer, even this far south, the syrupy gold in the sunlight, gaggles of kids going back to school, the smell of trees. Back in New York, he’d liked it. Liked his birthday coming up, liked seeing the leaves change.

Man, what a dumbass.

He rubbed his eyes, then dragged himself out of bed. For all that he’d ribbed Bucky and for all that he was the kind of person who couldn’t stamp down a mouthy little voice in the back of his head even when his job was following orders—they wouldn’t have strapped wings to his back and put him in the sky otherwise—he liked habit, and he liked structure. His head was filled with molasses and cotton wool, dragging him down like ballast, but his body knew half-six was a lie-in and that PT happened every day, rain or shine. He put on his gym clothes, walked past the kitchen and the sounds of Bucky puttering about, and went down to the basement.

Even with all the assembled gadgetry, in the glare of the fluorescent lights the Cap Central rooms under the house looked more like a suburban white dad’s mancave than the Batcave, but they did the job. Sam slowed down as he stepped into the room filled with training equipment, then stopped as his eyes fell on the uniforms hanging in the corner, white stars and white stripes, the electric lights casting a bluish gloss on the shield.

He made himself keep looking at his uniform as he stepped onto the treadmill, which right now felt as steep as the Everest, and kept right on looking as he picked up the pace and the slow burn in his leg muscles started melting through his thoughts. The white-and-blue tactical gear hung headless and empty, waiting to be filled. _Faster. Get your heart going_. The heavy parts of his and Bucky’s uniforms were where you couldn’t see, but they could carry them, even if their names weren’t Steve Rogers. _Faster_. His breathing sped up, filling the side of his chest with a dull ache. He could carry it. Even if he was the kind who could catch a cold and had started needing reading glasses.

Soon enough, his skin was fiery with sweat and heat and the pain in his chest had grown to a throb. He pushed himself through the rest of the routine, then pushed himself a little further, until his head had no room for anything that wasn’t the burn in his muscles, the clang of weights, his grunted breaths and the squeak of the mat as he forced himself through his hundredth push-up. Once he was done, after a set of rubber-limbed stretches and sitting there panting like a noisy steam engine, he managed to towel himself off and head back upstairs, one step at a time.

In the kitchen, Bucky was fussing at the sink one-handed and Sam’s pill bottle was waiting on the table, next to a glass of water. Sam lowered himself onto one the chairs, careful as glass and with a loud puff of effort, and swallowed a sweet, sweet endocet.

‘Good, you’re finally out of bed,’ Bucky said as he carried a heaping plate of waffles to the table and cast a half-appreciative, half-flustered look at Sam’s chest under the tight T-shirt. Sam ran a quick hand over Bucky’s hip as the other man walked past and felt his mouth water and his ache retreat at the scent of sugar and cinnamon and melted butter. Bucky loved breakfast. More importantly, he knew how to cook. More importantly still, he did it like someone still celebrating the end of rationing. Sam didn’t need to be told twice to dig in, nor told once that this really made him the happiest and luckiest guy alive, sitting here with his boy under the early morning sun, with the world not dying and his body turning sweetly slack and his mouth full of the kind of deliciousness that could probably cure something.

He shouldn’t keep having these little thorn thoughts, about white letters and how things should be better by now. About how _let it ride out, there’s no right or wrong about this, only thing you can control is how you carry it around_ just rattled about, empty dry shells.

 _You have to call her_. He pictured the living room handset, sleek and black and heavy as concrete.

‘—saying, Wilson?’

Sam looked up from his plate. ‘I _am_ listening,’ he said, as nonchalantly as he could, which was very.

‘Good,’ Bucky said, and slid a few sheets of paper past the cutlery and the pitcher of juice. Sometimes he really did look and sound like a cat studying a budgie. ‘I figure we should leave around eight.’

Sam pulled the papers towards him and riffled through them. There were printouts with various bits highlighted and notes added in Bucky’s neat handwriting, saying things like _Reservations?_ and _Memorials (heaps)_. ‘You want to go to the Library of Congress?’ Sam said, then flipped to another page. ‘And the National Gallery.’

‘Don’t forget the Newseum,’ Bucky said. ‘The Internet people speak highly of that one.’

‘Man, you realise we live here, right?’

‘Yup,’ Bucky said, as he ate a forkful of scrambled eggs. ‘That’s the point. I bet you’ve been in DC long enough to know all the best ways to get to these places.’

‘No, I’ve been in DC long enough to know all the best ways to avoid these places. Especially in a warm September.’ He flipped through a few more of the print-outs. ‘Why do you want to do all this tourist stuff anyway? You’re the one who keeps complaining about Brooklyn and rich assholes and how no one wears belt onions anymore.’

‘I’ll have you know you’d have found me a real knockout in my belt onion.’ He glanced down at his plate and tucked a lock of his chin-length hair behind his ear. ‘Come on. It’ll be fun. We’ll pretend we’ve just arrived from Poughkeepsie.’

‘It’s a day off. I was thinking more Netflix and chill, no wink emoticon.’ _Lying down and not having to say anything_. He knew where that achy grey was coming from, knew all the ways to tinker with it. It didn’t make a lick of difference. ‘But sure, let’s go out. All the places that don’t show up when you google “DC + TripAdvisor”.’ He brushed Bucky’s leg with his foot. ‘You know. The real city.’

Sam had taken Bucky around the real city before, the places where people lived and the bits of green tucked away by worn brick, the places where you could get cheap bad coffee and cheap great takeout. Bucky had told him about his New York, the stuff still left around new buildings and busted-up memories. He thought of the first time he’d thought of Bucky as Bucky, not as the Winter Soldier, or as Steve’s old friend, or someone he had to save for someone else’s sake. They’d been in Los Angeles, their weird little team huddled around a scored-up table in a taqueria that smelled of booze and the kind of roast meat you just knew would melt in your mouth like butter, and Bucky, sitting at Sam’s side and so close Sam could feel the cold metal through two different sleeves, had eaten a mouthful of his chalupa. He’d looked up, looked down hurriedly as they accidentally made eye contact, then slowly looked back at Sam. ‘I like it,’ he’d said, almost in a whisper, as though he wasn’t sure if he was allowed to.

‘D’you really want to stay home?’ Bucky asked, here and now. ‘We can—’

‘I—’ Sam said at the same time. They paused for a second and Sam glanced at Bucky’s itinerary again. It had, Sam realised, been organised by area, and Sam pictured Bucky huddled over his laptop, trying to be sneaky and completely unaware that the tip of his tongue was poking out of his mouth, because the ex-Winter Soldier could kill a man with his thumb but, more importantly, was also fucking _adorable_. ‘I guess you put a lot of effort into this, uh?’

‘Nah,’ Bucky said, reddening a little. ‘It’s no big deal.’ He trailed off, then spoke again. ‘I mean, it’s dumb, but I figured we needed dumb.’

‘Thanks, I guess.’

Bucky flipped him the bird with the metal hand but instead of laughing Sam only saw that thing that always made his heart ache, Bucky fastening a mask of humour and bravado over something that flinched and bled and maybe always would. ‘Something normal and average and, hell, maybe boring,’ Bucky went on. ‘Just something a couple of regular joes would do. I thought we could do with that for a change.’ His brow furrowed a little. ‘I bet you’re really tired from yesterday, though. You’re so cocky sometimes I forget you’re not actually super.’

‘I’m just gonna pretend I didn’t hear that last bit,’ Sam said, and it was Bucky’s turn to nudge Sam’s foot with his. ‘Sounds like a plan,’ Sam added, quieter.

It was worth it, to hear the little trickle of sunlight in Bucky’s voice. ‘Yeah? I keep telling you my plans are great.’

It was worth it, to push the words out through the fog and the grey, to do this thing for Bucky, who would jump into the line of fire to save a stranger’s life, who would do anything and everything for Sam, and had. And if he needed one day to feel like someone who hadn’t been crushed and cut into a diamond, sharp and cold and a valuable _thing_ , well, then Sam would— _Suck it up, Wilson. Just suck it up._

‘Come on,’ Bucky said, as he pushed his chair back, ‘let’s go grab your fanny pack.’

‘Oh, man, I swear if you whip out a selfie stick, you’re on your own.’

***

‘I can’t believe you’re dragging me to the National Building Museum,’ Sam said, and adjusted his grip on the souvenir bags he was carrying. Not only were the handles digging into his fingers, but one of the bags had an _I (Picture of George Washington’s head vaguely in the shape of a heart) DC_ logo, which surely meant this was the greatest sacrifice anyone had ever made for love.

‘Oh, wonders of engineering don’t do it for you?’ Bucky said in his most mocking tone, then slowed his pace just a fraction, so he could draw closer to Sam. Under the brim of his ball cap, his expression softened. ‘Are you tired?’

He was sure there was a giant blister forming in his right heel and after a few hours of the walk-stop-stand cycle of visitors’ tours, even all his training couldn’t stop his legs from feeling like half-cooked noodles.

But the weather was warm, and the sun glinted off the windows lining the wide streets and off the white dome of the Capitol in the southwards distance, and Bucky had nearly made him laugh inappropriately, and possibly illegally, in the Library of Congress. ‘It takes a lot more than this to tire me out.’

‘Hope you live up to the challenge, because it’s Microbe Week at the Koshland Science Museum,’ Bucky said, and brushed his knuckles against Sam’s. Their pile of paper bags made a crinkly noise as they bumped together, and Sam thought _guess there’s something better than staying in bed all day_. He didn’t mind it so much, even though it came in his most irritating let-us-discuss-coping-strategies-in-a-supportive-environment voice.

Bucky nodded with his chin towards some café tables sitting under parasols and trees about a hundred feet away. ‘You want to grab a drink before we dump this stuff—’

‘In hell?’

‘— _in the car_ ,’ Bucky said in a grumble.

The sight of the patio chairs made Sam’s legs feel more sore than ever and something ice-cold sounded like the promised land. He cast a sidelong look at Bucky, whose expression had gone back to the blank mask he usually wore in public. ‘Sounds good.’

Moments later, they were sitting at a corner table from where they could keep an eye on the street and the lunch crowd that had poured in from the nearby offices, and Bucky became suddenly absorbed on one of the coasters while Sam ordered two iced sweet teas. The server glanced unseeingly at Sam, then looked again while her brows furrowed a little. She was trying to place his face, he knew, only to give up after a second. ‘I’ll be back in five with your order.’

Bucky looked up again as she headed back indoors, relaxed a fraction. ‘I think I should have ordered.’ A little splinter in his tone, turned inwards. Bucky was the guy who tipped ten bucks on a twenty-dollar bill and who said “hey, it’s no big deal. It’s just coffee” to a barista who’d screwed up his order. He was also the guy who’d fobbed off a waiter’s “Hey, I know you from somewhere, right?” with “Nah, just one of those faces, I guess”, then had ducked into the men’s room. ‘Seeing as I was the one who invited you.’

‘Probably for the best. Remember that time with the fries?’

‘Look, back in my day the only options for fries were yes or no. You can’t blame me for the whole thing.’

‘Oh, that’s how you’re playing it? Three words: garlic aioli incident.’

Instead of replying, Bucky let out a small noise of derision and the corner of his mouth pulled up in a half-grin. He needed this, Sam realised, even if he would never voice it, in a way that had nothing to do with being just two regular guys lost in a flock of fellow tourists, or in the lunchtime hubhub of a café. He needed to be here outside of Avengers business, outside of all the comings and goings of regular life. Here, in the same streets where he’d carried out his last few missions as Hydra’s thing, where he’d come into Sam’s life in a hail of broken glass and bullets and death. Here, sitting at a table practically a stone’s throw away from the place where he’d been kept, frozen and bound and tormented by people with an eagle and a flag on their uniforms, while a few feet above the city went about its business.

There were probably still people around, Sam knew, who’d looked on calmly while Bucky—nameless, self-less—was ripped apart, people who had slipped away when S.H.I.E.L.D. fell, into a life of nice paychecks and drinking coffee and chatting with their friends, untroubled and undisturbed. There were places here that were the home turf of a monster who’d worn a golden smile and an expensive suit, whose photos were never going to be taken down from long rows of portraits in the halls of power, whose headstone was never going to read _Kidnapper, Murderer, Torturer_ , just as it was for any number of busts and statues throughout DC, shielded in marble and history.

Maybe it was a trip Bucky needed to take; he just wasn’t going to do it for his own sake, had to wrap it up in doing something fun with—for—Sam.

_Took you long enough to figure it out, dumbass._

Maybe it was something Sam needed too. That had taken even longer to figure out.

He looked at Bucky, a real look this time, eye-to-eye, felt the same heat in his cheeks when Bucky reddened a little and hunkered down, a smile under his ball cap, quick as lightning.

The table was small enough that Sam didn’t need to move much to brush his knee against his. ‘So… Microbe Week, huh?’ he said, warm and slow. He liked the thought of it. He really did.

Bucky straightened up, smooth again. ‘I know: one of my best ideas, small things considered.’

‘You’ve been waiting all day to make that terrible joke, haven’t you?’

Bucky rested his right hand on the table. The other remained on his thigh, tucked out of sight under a glove and a long sleeve. Very few people would notice that someone was doing everything one-handed if they didn’t know what to look for. ‘I can neither confirm nor deny,’ he said in a conspiratorial tone.

‘Ha, do you think they’ll be handing out free samples?’

‘I hear typhus is free, but they charge extra for TB. Don’t worry, though. I had polio as a kid, there’s a discount.’

‘Thanks, FDR. Hey, if you sneeze, do they stop—’ 

They both looked down at the same time and pulled out their buzzing phones. Alerts from the app scanning emergency frequencies peppered Sam’s screen. 911 call, 911 call, DCFEMS call, 911 call. ‘Shit,’ he let out, under his breath.

‘It’s coming from 8th Street.’

They had just enough time to glance at each other for a half second. Then Bucky said ‘I’ll get the car’ and sprang to his feet before jumping over the railing, so fast his chair fell sideways with a metal clunk.

There was a chorus of alarmed noises. Sam threw some cash on the table and nearly collided with the server as he hurried out. She gasped, spilled iced tea over her sleeve. ‘Money’s on the table,’ Sam said as he nudged her out of the way and raced out of the café. 

He dodged pedestrians as he ran, picking up speed until his lungs felt about to burst, took the corner so fast his momentum carried him onto the tarmac. Forty feet out, the car darted out of the car park, sending pigeons scattering and making a silver Volvo brake with a squeal of tires. Sam sped up, braced a hand on the Volvo’s hood, and jumped over the car.

‘Dude, what the fuck?’

Sam was already on the tarmac again, didn’t bother to turn around. ‘I’m Captain America,’ he yelled out to the driver. Just in front of him, Bucky popped the back door open.

‘Get in.’

Bucky already had his helmet on, but that was all Sam had time to notice as he jumped onto the back seat.

‘Fastest route to 8th and E Street,’ Bucky told the car’s OS, and they sped off with a loud rumble of the engine, taking the curve so fast Sam had to prop a leg against the car door to stop himself from falling.

 _Come on. Come on_. He lowered the back seat as the car’s self-driving system made it weave through traffic, sway as it mounted a kerb. They had brought their uniforms and equipment with them, same as always, day off or no day off. Jacket off, slacks off. Armour, weapons, gloves. Bucky squirmed his way to his side in time to clip the back of Sam’s belt for him, pulled the shield from the magnetic mounts in the trunk while Sam helped him with the upper half of his uniform.

They were two big men in a cramped space, undressing and suiting up in a speeding car, legs and elbows and combat boots and layers of kevlar, but they had a rhythm.

‘ETA,’ Sam said to the OS.

An electronic monotone: ‘ _93 seconds_.’

‘Arm.’

The plates on Bucky’s metal arm rippled open with a whir, closed again. ‘Check. Redwing.’

The car hit a manhole cover with a violent shudder. Sam righted himself, activated the drone. ‘Check.’

‘Comm link.’

Sam nearly dropped his before he put it in his ear. ‘Check.’

A blue eye looked at him. ‘Ready?’

He fastened his goggles in place. The world turned red. ‘Ready.’

The car spun and stopped with a screech of brakes. Sam’s arm hit the door, but he barely noticed it. His HMD targeted heat points in a plume of smoke, visible even from the car window.

‘Let’s roll.’

***

**TBC...**


	2. Chapter 2

**2.**

People were pouring out of the block of buildings, leaving restaurants and exiting glass doors and garages at ground level. There was already a crowd outside, milling about in some confusion, and when Sam stepped out of the car and sent Redwing up to scan the area, he could hear the wail of multiple alarms.

Smoke poured out of some of the open windows. He was picking up heat readings above three thousand degrees, but that was probably just the distance and interference from the walls, throwing the sensors out of whack.

‘People, keep the street clear, please.’ Bucky was already on the tarmac, turning traffic away and easing a logjam of cars that had formed at the exit of one of the block’s parking garages. He had a good, booming voice for orders, but people were listening to his stance and his uniform and his uncovered metal arm.

Sam stepped to his side and the two of them jogged to the nearest entry. ‘Multi-storey fire?’ Bucky said.

‘Looks like it.’

Here and there people cried out at them, but all Sam could think about was how he was sure he’d clipped on the wingpack wrong, that he’d fail to lace his boots right in his hurry. His stomach knotted, bobbed up towards his throat. He felt like was carrying a backpack full of rocks.

‘Redwing, on our six.’ The drone dove towards them.

Then they were inside the building and there was only the mission.

***

A group of people were coming down a flight of stairs into the reception area. They weren’t milling about; they were rushing with the start of panic. One of the men nearly fell down the last three steps.

Bucky ushered them out. ‘Get outside and stay outside. Stand clear of the building, fire department is on its way.’

Sam hurried towards the woman at the back, the one holding a hi-vis vest and a pair of heels on one hand. ‘Hey. Fire warden.’

‘Cap.’ She was struggling to focus, then her eyes widened as she looked into his goggles. ‘Is there an attack?’

‘I don’t think so. Listen, make sure everybody stays outside and sticks together. Put your vest on, OK?’

‘There wasn’t time—’ She made a motion for his arm, stopped herself at the last second. ‘It’s a real fire, Cap. The flames were spreading so fast—there’s a lot of smoke in the fire stairs—’

‘Which floor were you in?’

‘Third.’

‘Got all your people out?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Good.’

She spoke again before Sam had time to say anything else. ‘Cap, I think there’s still people in the fifth floor.’

‘We’ll find them.’ He gestured towards the doors. ‘You did good. Get them to safety now, OK?’

‘Fifth floor?’ Bucky asked as they rushed up the flight of stairs next to the lifts, following the exit signs. The wail of the alarms had turned into a dull ache in Sam’s eardrums. He tapped his goggles to activate Redwing’s feed. A small rectangle of video popped up inside his HMD. He switched it to motion detection mode. ‘Roger that. Redwing, search and rescue pattern.’

Behind them, the drone flew into the bowels of the building, through the gaps and crannies too small for a person.

More heat spots showed up in his HMD’s scanning system as they got to the fire doors leading into the stairs. ‘Getting a lot of heat moving into the second floor.’

‘Are you sure? Fire burns upwards.’

Sam didn’t reply. They had a split second to glance at each other and touch each other’s hand before they stepped into the stairwell and ran straight into a wall of heat.

***

His lungs burned with every breath. Through the goggles, the stairwell was a red tunnel five storeys high, a cloud of greasy smoke pouring out of ripped-open doors on the fourth floor.

‘What the hell.’ He had to struggle a little to get the words out.

‘I know.’ Bucky spoke effortlessly. ‘Something’s very wrong.’

Moving dots showed up on Redwing’s feed, seen through ghostly grey walls. ‘People headed this way, fifth floor.’

The had enough time to lunge towards the first set of steps when the air inside the stairwell grew even thinner and Sam saw tongues of fire haloing the torn doors above. The HMD zeroed in on movement near the top.

Bucky raced up the concrete steps. ‘Stop!’

He was too late. The fifth floor door swung open and fresh oxygen poured into the stairwell. Flames roared out of the fourth floor. The smoke swelled, blocked out the remaining light.

Someone screamed high above.

‘Buck, we’re going up,’ Sam coughed out as he fired up his propulsors.

There was barely enough room for the outstretched wings inside the stairwell. _Steady._. He adjusted course and let out a groan of effort as Bucky swung over the railing and grabbed his outstretched arm. A wing tip nearly struck the concrete steps.

_Steady. Steady._

They were up, up, up, through the searing smoke and past the flames. Sam’s nose and throat felt full of hot steel wire.

‘Stand back!’ Bucky yelled as he fired his grappling gun.

A choked yell of surprise as they hit the fifth floor landing and Sam’s wings slammed shut. There were three people trapped up here, one of the two men half-slumped against the wall, looking groggy and breathing too fast.

‘We can’t get down. The fire—’

‘We’re going straight past it,’ Sam said, and reached forward to grab the man closest to him.

‘Hold on tight,’ Bucky said as he hurried for the other two people, both shaky with terror. The smoke grew thicker and thicker. ‘You’re gonna let go and follow the exit signs as soon as you hit the ground.’

‘I can’t—’

‘You can. Close your eyes and hold your breath,’ Sam said just as they went over the railing.

There was another scream, but Sam barely heard it. They hurtled towards the ground of Bucky’s grappling line, past the blinding, burning heat.

 _Come on_. He fired up the propulsors again while Bucky braked with the metal arm and they slowed with a bone-shaking jerk, just enough not to slam into the concrete floor. ‘Go,’ Sam said.

The civilians fell to the ground in a heap just as the momentum sent Sam and Bucky back up. Sam spun around a little, then the two of them hit the third floor landing hard enough for Sam’s chest to feel the blow even through the layers of protective padding.

They had just enough time to glance down to make sure the trio were on their way out before they rammed through the nearest fire door and raced deeper into the burning building.

***

The fire department was on the scene and working at containing the fire by the time Sam and Bucky had rounded up the last few stragglers in the offices and handed them over to where there were fire ladders and hoses and waiting ambulances.

By then, an eternity and ten minutes since they’d entered the block, they both knew damn well it was arson. Faulty wiring or an unattended pan in a restaurant kitchen didn’t cause this, not fire that spread this fast or this hot, corridors with paint bubbling and raining down in flakes and packed with so much smoke Sam had to fly the two of them in and out through the windows, or rooms where flames spread across carpets and wastebaskets like they would across hot oil, barely doused by the sprinklers. It didn’t cause busted doors, or holes blasted into the walls between buildings.

Then there was that cloud of spot heat, moving from floor to floor, showing up from time to time in Sam’s HMD, the temperature impossibly high, always out of sight like a ghost.

‘Where to, Sam?’

They were racing across the maze of concrete and vents on the roof, a news helicopter hovering in the sky above. Sam pointed towards the lower building jutting out from the north end. ‘Over there—Redwing’s picking up activity in the lower floors.

‘Got it.’ Bucky picked up speed, jumped across a one-storey canyon, and used his arm and the shield to burst in one motion through a wall. Sam flew down to join him, not slowing down even though every muscle felt about to tear. They were both covered in sweat and soot, but Sam knew Bucky’s lungs didn’t feel like the air was slowly being squeezed out, his back and his legs didn’t feel like they were full of concrete. Sam kept going, though, matching Bucky stride for stride as they raced down a flight of stairs, even if he couldn’t match his speed. It wasn’t pride and it sure as anything wasn’t jealousy. It was having a job to do, and it was having his back.

‘Goddamnit, we were going to come here,’ Bucky said.

They were racing down the floors of the International Spy Museum. You could tell, even if the posters and signs for exhibits were going past too fast.

‘Natasha put you up to that?’ Sam managed to get out, then summoned Redwing to their side. The drone sped towards them from its perch on the roof, scanning the warren of basement corridors below all the while. Concrete and brick and plaster dampened the signal quite a bit, but it was still enough to see. ‘Looks like three people still down there.’

They slowed down a little and exchanged a quick look as they stepped through a staff-only door and down a staircase. The air was hotter down here, but not too hot, the area clear, the air smelling of air instead of the stink of smoke and burning artificial fibres. Maybe some people were trapped—a blocked wheelchair lift, a stuck door. Maybe.

‘You think the perps may be there,’ Bucky whispered.

It didn’t make much sense that someone would start a fire and then hang around in the basement of an adjoining building, but if someone had told him a few years back that he would some day fly around wearing a tricked-out flag and punching giant monsters in the face, he wouldn’t have believed them either. There were all kinds of things these days. ‘Let’s keep our eyes peeled,’ he whispered back.

They stepped carefully and slowly now, Redwing gliding almost soundlessly through the shadows, giving Sam a view of the corridors ahead. He thought of squat houses by a mountain road, could almost feel the kiss of dust on his skin again. Bucky’s hand hovered by the knife on his hip, and he moved like a hunting panther, smooth and unblinking.

The basement was a storage area, crammed with rooms and alcoves. A door had been left open, the office inside abandoned with a coat on the floor and a mug of coffee cooling on a desk.

Redwing swept past a corner. Sam summoned it back via the HMD. It had been just a one-second flash in the fisheye-lens view of the drone’s video mode, but it had been enough. He replayed the last few seconds of the feed.

Someone in a fire suit and respirator mask, standing at the end of the corridor around the corner, a gun holstered at his hip.

Sam signalled to Bucky. The two of them clung to the wall, edged forward until Bucky could pull out a smudged mirror, because sometimes age-old sniper tricks worked best.

They watched and waited for a little while, long enough for Sam to be sure he could feel his blood slow down, and for the pain in his chest to ebb back.

The crackle of a two-way radio. ‘Still all clear,’ the gunman said, then added, ‘And hurry up. We’re supposed to be out of here in five.’

Sam exchanged a look with Bucky again.

This wasn’t an arson attack. It was a heist.

***

**TBC…**


	3. Chapter 3

**3.**

Sam kept listening, his breathing slow and steady and the rest of him taut as a violin string. His mouth tasted of iron, mixed in with smoke.

‘No, do I look like a babysitter? … Fine, just let me know when you guys have got your hands off your dicks. Make sure Tweedledee blows up the basement.’ Another little crackle of static and he fell silent again.

 _At least three people down here, plus someone who sounds like their exit strategy_ , Sam thought, and looked at Bucky. The helmet covered a good chunk of his face, but Sam could still see his expression, blank and sharp like a razor.

 _Barcelona_ , Sam mouthed. Bucky gave him a quick thumbs-up before he moved away from the wall so he could slip the shield off his back and hand it to Sam. He held one hand up as he edged forward.

Sam tamped down the itch in his fingers and readied the throw.

Bucky dashed out, too fast for a human gunman. The man in the suit managed to look up and reach for his handgun just as Bucky raced up the wall and Sam lunged forward and threw the shield.

He had trained until the muscles in his arms and back felt like jelly, and his shot went just right. Bucky back-flipped over the shield and landed as the shield hit the target and made him crumple to the floor, handgun barely out of the holster.

‘Looks like he’ll be out for a few minutes,’ Bucky said as he cuffed him.

Sam nodded and picked up the shield. The two of them stepped up to the door at the end of the corridor, waited until Redwing finished its scan, and snuck inside.

The room was full of metal shelving units loaded with filing and storage boxes, enough for them to keep out of sight. Through a gap, Sam could see two more men in fire suits and masks, both armed, one standing while the other went through the boxes on a bottom shelf.

‘Hurry up,’ Standing Guy said. ‘We already have the fire department on our ass.’

‘Yeah, and whose fault is that? Hang on, here we go.’ He grabbed a small box and ripped it open, pulling out something wrapped in foam. Packing peanuts rained down. The man yanked the foam away, revealing what looked like a portable teletype device, then he spoke on his two-way radio. ‘Dunlay, we got it. Go ahead with the code.’

He waited for a moment, then tapped a complicated pattern on the machine’s keys. A small hidden drawer popped out. The gunman fished inside with two gloved fingers and pulled out a small dusty cube of dark rock.

The other guy was already holding up a device that looked a little like a Geiger counter. He passed the wand over the rock. The deviced buzzed. Cracks in the rock glowed for a second, then winked out again.

Sam didn’t need that to know this was what they were after. The moment the gunman had pulled the rock out of its lead-lined compartment, the energy signature had lit up Sam’s HMD like an arc reactor.

‘It checks out,’ the other guy said as he pulled the wand away.

Bucky nudged Sam’s side. His expression was no longer empty. Now it was wound up tight and brittle. _Hydra_ , he mouthed.

 _Are you sure?_ Sam thought, but knew better than to say it, even if they didn’t have to be quiet. Yeah. Yeah, he was sure.

These three dumbasses weren’t Hydra, though. They were thieves.

Which left a question mark by the remaining members of this little operation.

‘OK, let’s wrap this up,’ the first guy said, and put the stone inside his suit. ‘Get—’

Sam had enough time to exchange the go sign with Bucky. The guy with the stone didn’t have enough time to get to the end of the word before Bucky sprang out, swung around the shelves, and kicked him straight in the chest. He flew a few feet back and struck the wall with a loud _oof_.

The other guy grabbed his gun and squeezed two shots out. By that time Sam had already dived in, shield at the ready while Bucky ducked. The bullets hit the shield harmlessly and Sam swung the shield forward, knocking the gun off the man’s hand, then followed it with a punch to the throat.

No two-hand play here. Just a fight in a cramped space, quick and nasty. The second guy tried to scramble across the floor, reaching for the Glock lying close to his hand. Bucky put his boot on his wrist, enough to make him yelp but not enough to cause damage, then trained his own gun on him. ‘Don’t,’ he said, in a voice final as the grave. ‘Don’t.’

***

‘Figures we’d get Captain Fucking Wonder Twins on our asses. Hey, you two don’t have any aliens or some shit to fight?’

Without the respirator mask, the ranting guy was just an average white man in his thirties, the kind you’d have trouble picking out of a line-up. Sam didn’t pay him much attention while he and Bucky ushered the trio, hands cuffed behind their backs, towards the museum exit and the emergency crews assembled outside. The one Sam had knocked out was still a little groggy; Bucky had to do most of the walking for him.

‘Redwing find the rest of the goon squad yet?’ Bucky said.

Something about that made Ranting Guy dig in his heels into the floor. ‘Hey.’ Sam kept on ignoring him. Redwing had picked up motion at the south end of the museum, heading downwards. Whatever it was, it was only showing up as a blurry, wavering grey cloud. ‘Hey.’

‘Man, shut up,’ Sam said.

‘Yo, Black Cap, tell One-Armed Cap to fucking stop pushing me, there’s something you gotta know.’

Well, at least he was making a real effort to be polite. It was heart-warming.

Bucky kept on ushering him forward. ‘Yeah, I’m sure the judge will love it.’

‘I’m trying to help you, assholes.’

His fellow scumbag objected to that. He coughed, then spoke in a hiss. ‘Dude, keep your trap—’

‘You want to be be stuck in here with her?’

Sam glanced at Bucky and they both drew to a halt. Bucky yanked the man around to face him and gave him an iceberg stare. ‘Spill.’

‘Listen, the dumbass you’re looking for, he set this up because of his cousin. She’s the one who did everything. The fire, all that stuff. She was supposed to collapse the ceiling down in one of the parking garages so everybody would be too busy dealing with that shit to notice us leaving. Only it was supposed to be a small fire, enough to clear the buildings and cover our tracks. In and out, man. I swear that was all. I guess you see how that turned out.’

Bucky was silent for a moment, then spoke to Sam, eyes still on the perps. ‘How do you rate this guy’s story, Cap?’

‘Five out of ten, Cap. Needs improvement. Don’t quit your day job. Seriously, man.’

That didn’t anger the guy, though. He spoke faster, as though a real panic was setting in. ‘I’m telling you, it’s them. They even grabbed a museum guy.’

Bucky’s nonchalance slipped a little. ‘There’s a civilian still in here?’

When Sam spoke again, it was in an iron band voice. People weren’t things. You didn’t bring them up at the last minute. ‘You’d better not—’

Redwing’s feed cut off.

He tapped his goggles, tapped them again. ‘Redwing, come in. Redwing.’

The feed switched on again, video mode this time, spinning and jumping wildly. Sam saw patches of wall, corners of glass, tile. Redwing was engaging in emergency evasive manoeuvres, doing the cutting-edge smart drone equivalent of getting the hell out of Dodge.

It must have shown just a little despite the goggles and his poker face.

‘Yeah—yeah, you believe me now, right?’

‘I believe you as far as I can throw you. What are we dealing with here?’

‘She’s one of those—you know the ones, those people who get all those powers from eating three-eyed fish, shit like that. She can set you on fire just thinking about it.’

Bucky looked at Sam, metal arm holding the guy in place.

One of those people who got all those powers. Sam wasn’t an expert, but he knew enough about it. One of those people living ordinary lives, not knowing about about the tiger coiled up in their DNA until the day the right exposure to the right kind of thing tore it free.

One of those people who woke up from a fever sleep suddenly able to kill a crowd with a scream, or with electricity spilling from their fingers, or with their heads filled with other people’s thoughts.

An Inhuman.

***

**TBC…**


	4. Chapter 4

**4.**

_Save the people first._

The sounds from 9th Street were very faint now, a river of flashing lights six storeys and a world away. Bucky landed soundless on the windowsill, ripped the latch open, and jumped into the building. Sam swept back down, tucked in his wings, and dove in after him.

They had lost any element of surprise, had blown minutes by the handful getting the Three Stooges out of the building and into custody, telling the emergency personnel that they were dealing with someone who could possibly level the whole block, waiting for the crowd to be pushed back a little. Whoever was inside this building had to know they were coming. They didn’t even have Redwing. Sam wasn’t going to let it fly another mission until its sensors were repaired.

Sam got to his feet, retracted the wings fully. ‘Take it floor by floor.’

This was was they did, though. You got people to safety even if that meant risking yourself more, even if that meant letting the bad guy get away with it. It wasn’t really about how strong you were, or how fast, or how good a shot, even though that mattered. It was about having lines in the sand. That mattered more.

‘They moved through here,’ Bucky said, and pointed at the staircase walls, streaked with peeling paint and charred plaster, the pattern oddly beautiful, like the stripes of some strange animal.

‘Heat spots,’ Sam whispered when they reached the third floor and white flashes showed up in his HMD. They slowed down a little, moved soundlessly. This part of the museum was mostly intact, the exhibits full of blind ends, shadow-thick crannies where someone could hide. Here and there, exit signs glowed a dull red. The fire alarms inside the museum had been cut off, and now there was only a dusty silence.

Bucky stopped and grabbed his arm. ‘I can hear them,’ he said in a whisper, and pointed towards a zig-zagging corridor lined with cases and wall displays. ‘North-west corner.’

They ducked into a recess in a metal wall housing a blank screen. Sam tried to home in on the perps, but all he could see from here was the elbow of a corridor, the metal struts in the ceiling. There was too much crap in the way, even for his gadgets. Not for Bucky’s senses, though.

Sam’s fingers hovered by one of the Steyrs on his belt. ‘OK,’ he whispered. ‘Double-back and go in on the right.’ There was probably a wall or two in the way, but that wouldn’t be a problem for Bucky. ‘I’ll go in on this side, cut them off. Box them in.’

Bucky shook his head, still looking at some point beyond the panel wall across them. ‘Sam, they’ve got the hostage with them.’

‘Christ.’ He swallowed a sigh. ‘OK.’ No chance of a sniper shot here, even if Bucky had brought one of his rifles with him. And who knew if a pyrokinetic Inhuman would go down with a bullet in her calf? That’d probably just make everything worse.

‘I’m going in,’ Bucky said in a raspy whisper, and reached for the shield on his back. ‘I need a distraction. Catch the shield after I throw it.’

‘What kind of half-assed plan is that?’ Sam hissed.

Bucky didn’t look at him, just finished slipping the shield off. ‘You know damn well it’s not nearly as dangerous for me as it is for the hostage. Or for anyone outside the block, for that matter.’

‘Bucky…’

This time he did turn around. ‘Or for you.’

‘Buck.’

He brushed the corner of Sam’s mouth with the back of his fingers, just for a second. ‘I’m sorry, Sam. We don’t have a choice. Get the hostage while they’re busy with me.’

 _Stop him_ , he thought, and knew he wouldn’t. ‘Don’t make me have to save your ass.’

He had just enough time to see Bucky’s little half-smile before the other man took off towards the northwest corner, too fast for Sam to keep up. He threw the shield, effortless like a hot knife through butter, and it sliced through the ceiling canopies with a shower of sparks, bounced off concrete at just the right angle.

A shout from the other end of the corridor, where Sam couldn’t see.

Sam nearly slammed into a wall, dodged, raised his arm as he ran to catch the shield. It slammed onto the magnetic stripes on his gauntlet hard enough to almost yank his arm back and he had to use all his strength to take the corner.

He felt the explosion before he heard it.

It ripped through the wall partitions, lifted him off his feet, slammed him into a glass display.

His head filled with a red starburst of pain. The sound hit him. Then the dust, sandpapering his throat as he fell to the floor.

A glimpse of Bucky’s uniform, red-on-red in the HMD. _Buckydon’t_ , halfway to his mouth.

Then everything turned black.

***

It was a week after he’d become Captain America, the uniform still full of unfamiliar seams digging into his skin and the shield still wobbling like a dinner plate whenever he threw it, and Sam was sitting in one of the Avengers’ break rooms, watching the news show the place where he’d let someone die.

On the TV screen there was only only grainy cell phone footage of a block of buildings collapsing into rubble. There wasn’t the roar filling up the air, the cloud of dust and debris engulfing everything like a living thing. There wasn’t that moment—a split second and a hundred years—of terror and resignation on the man’s face when Sam failed to reach him, just before he was swallowed up, the cries of the older woman trying to kick her way out of Sam’s grip and out of the harness pulling her to safety.

Bucky came into the room after a while, hands buried in the pockets of an oversized fleece, the bruises on the side of his face already faded to almost nothing. He didn’t look Sam in the eye, just strode over to the couch. ‘Mind if I take a seat?’

‘Go ahead,’ Sam said. He looked down at the mug he was nursing to give his hands something to do. ‘Uh, you want some coffee?’

‘No, thanks,’ Bucky said, and sat down on the other end of the couch, eyes on the screen.

The news had moved on to some red carpets award show by the time Sam spoke again. ‘You don’t have to try to make me feel better.’ He said it to the TV, not turning to look at Bucky. ‘Someone died on my watch. It wasn’t the first time, and I doubt it’ll be the last. I’m not gonna pretend I’m fine. But I _am_ dealing with it.’

Neither of them spoke for a while, and Sam let himself sink a little more into his end of the couch. Maybe he was supposed to feel guilt, sadness, anger, or maybe he was supposed to understand it all came with the territory, which was worse, but all he managed to muster was tiredness, weighing down everything like lead.

‘I wasn’t going to say that.’ Bucky was silent for a few moments. ‘You can’t save everyone.’

He couldn’t muster the energy for a sarcastic comeback, which was probably for the best. ‘Yeah, I know.’ _You try to save everyone you can. Sometimes that doesn’t mean everybody_. He knew that. And a lot of the time that was just going to feel like an excuse, or a way to pretend some parts of you hadn’t hardened to stone or been rubbed away to nothing. He knew that too.

Maybe it was the uniform. He certainly had no delusions about the stars and stripes, he’d lived in his skin more than long enough for that. But there was something about that Bastard Offspring of the Bastard Offspring of a Chorus Girl Outfit, even if Steve wasn’t the one wearing it. He wasn’t sure what it was. Hope, maybe, or something even frailer. The idea that things could be better after all. That you could be better.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Bucky said.

Sam did look at him now. Bucky was still staring at the screen, his shoulders a little hunched. ‘I used to tell myself… that I didn’t want it. What, uh, what happened to me. I mean, not really. That it wasn’t my fault. Still say it sometimes. I guess I thought it would help.’ He paused for a second before he went on, his lips twitching in a smile, or a grimace. ‘Maybe that’s all true, that I didn’t want it, maybe it’s not. It’s just—it doesn’t really matter. True or not, doesn’t make any difference. And I know it.’ He glanced over at Sam. ‘You know what I mean?’

‘Bucky, what you went through, I can’t...’ He trailed off, looked at the screen again. ‘Yeah,’ he said after a while, softly. ‘Yeah. I know what you mean.’

A couple of minutes later, Bucky put his hand on the space between them, palm up. It was his metal hand, the one that didn’t feel much of anything that wasn’t pressure, least of all inside a glove. But Sam’s hand did.

Sam knew he could do nothing. Bucky wouldn’t say a word, would just return his hand to his pocket. He could just stay put, and neither of them would mention it.

Instead, he reached out across the couch and placed his hand on Bucky’s. The metal fingers entwined with his, a fraction slower and a fraction clumsier than a flesh hand.

‘Wow, they’re making a _Snakes and Ladders_ movie?’ Bucky said after Sam didn’t know how long. ‘Is this what 21st century movies are all about, Wilson? They make a _Monopoly_ one too?’

‘Yeah, well, joke’s on you, because they did make a _Monopoly_ movie.’ He kept holding Bucky’s hand. The metal was hard, and cold, but it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter one bit. ‘This guy called Ryan Reynolds played the dice.’

***

**TBC…**


	5. Chapter 5

**5.**

He gasped, swallowing a handful of dust. When he coughed, his chest felt like it was on fire.

Numbers and lines fizzled and stuttered in front of his eyes. He gritted his teeth and bit down a moan of pain as he sat up and pulled his goggles up, resetting the HMD with a shaky finger. He blinked, blinked again.

He was sitting on a puddle of broken glass, surrounded by fallen sheet metal, chunks of concrete, torn struts hanging from the ceiling. The shield was lying by his side. He pulled the goggles back down. Had he blacked out? Maybe for a second, the shield and the suit had absorbed the brunt of the impact from the—

_Oh shit._

‘Bucky?’ He coughed again, tapped the comm link still—small mercies did happen—in his ear. ‘Buck. Come in. Come in.’

There was only silence and the faint crackle of flames. He got to his feet, swaying a little, and called the shield up to his left arm.

Someone cried out. He stepped around the top half of a leather-clad mannequin lying on the floor, ducked under a floodlight hanging from a frayed electrical cord like an oversized fruit. A snapped cable writhed above, filling the air with sparks and the smell of burnt copper.

‘Someone… please…’ A dark red—brown—hand was scrambling for purchase on the floor, poking out from under a fallen poster display unit.

‘Here,’ Sam said, and rushed to the person’s side.

The man lying prone under the debris tried to squirm away at first, then quietened when he saw Sam’s uniform. ‘Cap,’ he coughed out. The display’s base was still firmly bolted to the floor and it hadn’t toppled over flat; that had probably saved the man’s life. ‘I thought… it was them. They made me—’

At least the civilian was safe. More or less.

‘It’s OK.’ Sam held his wrist, checked his pulse. ‘I’ve got you. What’s your name?’

‘Uh.’ He took a gulp of air. ‘Ty. Ty DeLeon.’ He struggled to crawl out from under the metal pinning him down, then stood still, the right side of his face pressed against the floor. He blinked several times. ‘I lost a contact lens.’

His body wasn’t going into shock, at least not yet, but his brain was reaching that point where Sam had seen men and women calmly wander about, looking for their freshly blown-up limbs.

‘Ty, hey, look at me. I’m going to help you, I just need you to work with me, OK?’ The comm link was still silent, three-quarters of his mind racing. _Focus. You have to_ — ‘Are you having trouble breathing? No? Can you feel your legs?’

‘It’s trapped.’ He was really trying to get out, now. ‘God, please get me out—’

Sam clasped his shoulder, reassuring but holding him firmly in place. ‘Listen to me. I know this is scary as hell, but you gotta help me. I need to know if it’s safe to pull you out.’

Ty stopped struggling, swallowed a mouthful of air. ‘Yeah. Yeah, I can feel my legs. They hurt.’

If he had a spinal injury, it couldn’t be too bad. Sam would risk it. He felt around the bulky display unit, searching for leverage, until it became obvious that he was going to have to deadlift it.

‘OK, Ty, I’m going to lift this thing and you’re going to crawl out.’

‘I can’t—’

‘No, I know you can do it.’ He stuck the shield on the back of the wingpack, where it would be out of the way, then felt the fallen display again for the best handhold. ‘On three, all right? One, two…’

The space was too cramped and the explosion too recent to risk a boost from the propulsors. He groaned with effort and pain as he pulled, his arms feeling like they were going to rip right out of their sockets.

‘ _Hey_.’ A voice in his ear. He nearly lost his grip, braced himself with his legs. ‘ _Hey_.’

‘Buck?’ he managed to get out.

‘ _It’s OK_ ,’ Bucky said, his voice fuzzy with electronic noise. ‘ _It’s OK_.’

Sam was sure something inside him was going to tear as he finally got the display to budge with a loud screech of metal. ‘Come on. Come on.’

Ty let out a yelp, then crawled out from under the display, streaking blood on the floor. Sam reached down with one hand and dragged him out just as he released the display with the other. It fell back down with a bone-shaking crash and a scattering of dust.

‘God.’ He nearly sprawled on the floor. Instead he kneeled by the civilian and gently rolled him onto his side. Muscle memory took over. His mind was shaking too hard, yelling Bucky’s name. ‘It’s OK. Let me look at your leg.’ Slacks torn up over the left leg, sticky with blood. Cuts from glass, crush injury from the display, not good, femoral artery seemingly intact. That was something. He reached into his belt, took out a spray bottle. ‘This’ll sting just a little, but it’ll help with the bleeding.’ The first part was a lie and Sam knew it, but right now all he could think was—

_Bucky_

—that Ty’s noises of pain were going to draw the perps’ attention. He tried to quieten him. ‘Shh. Shh. It’s OK. It’s over.’ He looked around. ‘Bucky, can you hear me?’

He thought he was going to cry with relief when he heard Bucky’s voice in his ear again, glass-smooth. ‘ _Yeah. Yeah, it’s all right_.’

According to the trace on the HMD, Bucky’s comm link was not too far.

‘Bucky, are you alone?’ He slipped a hand around Ty’s waist and hoisted him up. ‘Come on, man. We got to move.’ Ty swallowed a groan as he took a step, but didn’t protest, his arm slung around Sam’s shoulders.

‘ _No_ ,’ Bucky said. ‘ _I’m not gonna hurt you_.’

 _Got it_ — Sam didn’t have time to finish the thought before he heard another voice on the comm link, high and spiky with panic. ‘ _That’s right, you fucking won’t!_ ’

‘Shit. Bucky, I’m on my way.’

‘ _No_ ,’ Bucky said. ‘ _No, I guess not a lot of people can hurt you_.’

‘Captain,’ Ty said as Sam dragged them onwards, towards the dot on his HMD.

‘’s OK, I’m gonna get you out of here, I just need to meet up with my partner. Bucky, copy all those messages.’

There was a hole on the floor up ahead, half-hidden by the layout of the exhibits, where the explosion had ripped through the building, torn up its guts, filled up the air with the acrid smell of burning plastic. Chunks of concrete and aluminium lay everywhere. A 60s car had been swallowed halfway into the hole, its front wheels still stuck to its stand.

Sam lowered Ty onto the floor. He squirmed a little, wide-eyed, until Sam made a _shh_ gesture, mouthed _I’ll be right here_ , and picked his way through the debris towards the edge of the hole, treading stealthy. The air was roiling with heat, a pale haze in the red making the sensors in his HMD spin madly. He pulled his goggles up and moved forward.

The explosion had melted the edges of the hole, metal and concrete smooth as soap, burst pipes drooping down. It had ripped straight through to the first floor. Something—relief, fear—swelled hot and cold inside Sam’s ribcage as he looked over the edge, keeping himself out of sight.

There was a restaurant on the building’s ground floor, the burger joint Sam had seen without seeing when he’d flow up the building’s facade. The windows were hazy with smoke, but he could still see the red and blue flashes of emergency lights, spinning on outside the building. Bucky was on his knees, corralled in place by broken tables and chairs, a huge chunk of fallen masonry. Sam was sure he could see a grimace of pain or discomfort in his face, even at this distance, but at least Bucky looked well enough to free himself; Sam had seen him fall from higher places without a scratch.

A few feet away from him, balancing on a fallen panel just next to the ruined kitchen, stood a woman—no, a girl, an arm held tightly against her chest at a weird angle, the other raised in a warning, her red-gold hair swaying in the roiling air.

All around them, there was fire.

A ring of flames, starting nowhere, racing— _so fast_ —over splintered wood, licking at the windows, devouring the paper wrappers in the kitchen. The air was heavy with smoke, the heat wrung rivulets of sweat from Sam’s exposed skin. Oil boiled in abandoned fryers.

_Oil. Drums of oil._

‘Stay where you are!’ she cried out as Bucky shifted his position, and the flames around the room roared up before she even finished the sentence.

‘It’s all right,’ Bucky said, and slowly lifted his hands. He was a big man and he was strong enough to punch through walls, but right now, on his knees, stained with dust and soot, skin shiny with sweat, he looked terribly breakable. ‘See? My hands are empty.’

Sam pulled down his goggles, zoomed in on the girl. Up close he could see the fresh bruise on her cheek, the eyes wide. He didn’t need the goggles to recognised that stance, though, the body language of a frightened, cornered animal.

Those were always dangerous. They’d try to claw their way out.

How fast was she? Faster than a bullet? Faster than Bucky? Flames licked at the ruined ceiling. The air temperature rose all around her, then dropped by only a fraction.

‘Christ, Buck,’ he whispered, hoping the comm link would pick it up. ‘Get—’

The first bullet whizzed past him, but by the time Sam heard the second and the third pop he’d already dived towards Ty, shield up to protect him.

‘That’s them!’ Ty struggled to stand up.

The shooter was on the move. ‘I know,’ Sam said, as he scanned the ruined corridors. For a split second he was sure he saw a shadow vanish under an Exit sign, but there were too many exhibits and wall partitions in the way. He nearly drew one of his Steyrs on instinct, before his brain spoke over his hand. A shootout with SMGs was only going to make everything worse. ‘Come on.’

‘ _It’s all right, everything’s all right_ ,’ Bucky was saying over the comm link as Sam pulled Ty to his feet and dragged him towards an alcove, trying not to make too much noise on the aluminium floor. ‘ _Bree. That’s your name, right?_ ’

‘Keep her talking,’ Sam whispered.

‘ _How do you know that?_ ’ the girl said, voice half-sharp, half-damp.

Ty was turning to dead weight on Sam’s arm, heavier and heavier despite being a skinny kid who looked like he’d been hired straight out of kindergarten. _Bucky_ , some part of Sam’s mind thought, over and over, like a one-word prayer, in time with each drag of breath.

‘ _I could hear your partner on your two-way radio, telling you to stick to the plan—_ ’

‘Here,’ Sam whispered as they moved past a bank of computer screens and towards a narrow flight of stairs leading up to a fake air duct. He started hoisting Ty up the steps. ‘Stay out of sight. I’ll deal with him.’

‘— _to just get rid of me_.’ 

‘What?’ Ty let out a groan of pain when his injured leg slipped on one of the steps and Sam was sure you could hear the clatter and their voices across the whole floor. ‘Don’t leave me here alone, man!’

‘ _Look at me. I just fell two storeys when you blew up the floor and I’m right as rain. You didn’t think you were the only person out there who was different from everyone else, did you?_ ’

 _Establish rapport_ , some old training manual said inside his head, unwanted. Sam looked at the young man hanging off his arm. Sweat pearled his forehead. His eyes were starting to glaze over with shock.

‘ _I don’t— Just shut up!_ ’ Bree cried out over the comm link. ‘ _Go to hell!_ ’

‘OK,’ Sam mouthed. If a civilian got trapped here… He held him more firmly, almost lifted him up the stairs, past the Exit Only sign. The pain in Sam’s chest had grown teeth.

‘ _I’m sure I will_ ,’ Bucky said. ‘ _And I’m sure there’s no getting out from here. Not the way you think_.’

‘ _You don’t know anything._ ’

There was barely enough room for the two of them inside the winding duct. Sam pushed the mesh ceiling up, trying to be as quiet as possible as he moved across the carpeted floor.

‘ _I know you were planning on leaving through the parking garage_ ,’ Bucky was saying, his voice a little slurry. Sam tried not to think of what the heat must be doing to him, if the seam of his metal arm was starting to get hot enough to burn his flesh. He thought about it anyway. ‘ _I know those mercs who were working with you are on their way to jail. I know the entire block is surrounded. And I know what’s going to happen in here very soon._ ’

‘Come out, Captain.’ The voice was too far away and too muffled by walls and layers of metal for Sam to pinpoint it, his targeting system flickering back and forth in confusion, but he could at least tell it was younger than he expected.

‘ _My dad was a fireman._ ’ Bucky’s voice was flat while Sam pulled out his phone and typed as fast as he could, his fingertips clumsy all of a sudden. ‘ _See that smoke? It’s full of flammable gas. The heat is climbing fast in an enclosed space and there’s plenty of oxygen. There’s going to be a flashover. Everything in this room is going to ignite at once._ ’

 _Jesus_. He showed the message on the screen to Ty, whose head was almost resting on Sam’s side. _u kno these 2? tryng to tk hydra obj from musm, need names + info_. He pulled out his comm link from his ear for a second so he could whisper into it, almost soundless. ‘Buck, are you sure?’

‘Hydra?’ Ty mouthed, his eyes wide under the glare of the phone screen.

‘ _It’s going to happen. If we’re lucky we may get a rollover first, if the gas near the ceiling goes up in flames. That’ll give us a little warning._ ’

 _know 0 abt hydra stuff thought nuclr stff carrier_. Ty was typing laboriously on the screen, his hand shaking a little. _he usd wqrk w/me austin cnt rmbr surnm_.

 _Dunlay_ , Sam thought, and hoped he remembered right. Maybe that was a fake, but...

‘ _I don’t believe you!_ ’ Her voice was all bravado now, full of glass and splinters. ‘ _And it won’t_ —’

Sam hoisted Ty up again, supporting him with his arm while he tapped and swiped the phone screen with his other hand. He could feel sweat pooling under the rim of his goggles as he inched down the duct, towards the steps at the other end.

‘ _Kill you? Maybe not. But there are people who left this block in ambulances, Bree. I don’t think you’ve killed anyone yet. But once you cross that line… That’s something you can never take back. Do you really want to find out what that’s like?_ ’

Sam stepped out of the stairs and into an enclosed area covered in enlarged black-and-white photos, one eye on his surroundings and the other on his phone screen. A tiny digital footprint for a Bree Dunlay, an absent mother, an aunt with custody, what looked like a cousin, Austin Dunlay. Just two nobodies, two kids, barely out of their teens. Not pros, not masterminds, just probably dumb and probably scared.

There were no results for the last six months.

‘Are you scared, Captain?’ the voice said again, and this time Sam pinpointed it to the southwest. _Kid… you’re starting to drive me nuts_. He touched his comm link with his fingertip, tapped the info in rapid-fire Morse code as he edged forward, past cables hanging from loose panels in the ceiling and a glass cabinet burst open by the blast.

_Please tell me you got all that, Buck._

‘ _I know it wasn’t your call to get these powers, that you can’t really control them yet._ ’ Bucky’s breathing was coming a little harder now, like he was struggling to keep his mind working. ‘ _Probably not your call to do any of this, either. Sometimes it’s easier to not have a choice. If you kill someone, all you’re going to have for the rest of your life are bad ones. At least let me tell the crews outside to get back before you blast through the floor._ ’

Sam took two miniature speakers from a belt pouch. ‘We’re going for a ride,’ he mouthed to Ty. He looked like he’d burned through his last reserves of adrenaline, his grip on Sam’s shoulders slack, his left foot dragging bonelessly on the floor. Sam clipped one of his harness cables around his waist.

‘ _I’m not going to jail_ ,’ the girl said, almost in a sob. ‘ _And I’m not going to be—like—to have someone tell me— Come in. Come in._ ’

‘ _It’s not down to Austin for once, Bree. I know he’s taken care of you all your life, but today it’s down to you._ ’

‘ _How— How do you know—_ ’

_Gotcha._

Sam rolled one of the speakers across the floor, towards the hole from the explosion. It was going to get stuck. It wasn’t going to work—

‘This way,’ he said into the other speaker. ‘Kid, hand yourself in and we can end this right now.’

A gun muzzle edged out from behind a wall partition, followed by a weedy-looking teen. He wasn’t clearing the corner properly, wasn’t scanning his surroundings. The semi-auto in his hands was shaking a little. He had no idea what he was doing; he’d just been lucky.

He moved towards the sounds coming from the speaker.

‘We both know you’re not smart enough to get out of this.’

‘I am _not_.’ Sam could see him speaking on his two-way radio while he pointed his gun, ready to pull the trigger. ‘Bree, do it! Do it!’

Sam burst out from behind the partition, so fast he kicked a dent into a metal panel. His wings half-unfurled, his propulsors whisking him forward even with Ty’s weight.

‘Do it n—’

He barely had time to begin turning around before Sam was on him, knocking him down with a half-force kick. ‘Kid… just shut up.’

He landed with a bone-shaking jolt as the kid crumpled to the ground, Sam’s hand already on the shield. ‘Bucky, now!’ No need to spell it out, no need even to get a good look at each other.

He didn’t see, didn’t think, just threw the shield, left-handed, working off muscle memory. Something in his chest and shoulder felt like it was tearing, but he barely noticed.

The shield spun down. It was moving fast enough to trail a steely hum as it sliced through the air, but for a moment Sam was moving underwater, every muscle feeling like a bag of jelly as he swooped down to grab the kid with his free arm.

Then everything went blisteringly fast. The girl had just enough time to glance up. A cloud of flame ignited around her, but Bucky was already moving. He burst through the debris around him in a shower of dust and splinters and snatched the shield in midair, blocking the flames just as Sam jumped down, wings outstretched.

Bucky gave the girl a love-tap with his right hand and grabbed her as Sam crashed into the burning restaurant, just as a sea of flames rolled under the ruined ceiling.

 _Up. Up_. Sam groaned with effort, weighted down by his passengers, and managed to spin sideways, leg catching broken wood, inches above the floor. Bucky punched through a wall and window, shield raised, a tide of flames spreading all around them, too fast, boiling the air.

They dove through a rain of glass just as the world filled up with fire.

***

Flashing lights. Shards of grass, sprinkling the ground.

He blinked, opened his eyes, blinked again. Something (someone?) was wailing, far away.

 _Captain_.

It was like trying to move at the bottom at the ocean. He raised his head, looked at his hand, covered in dark red.

‘Captain.’

The world snapped back into place. He was lying on tarmac, near a hose fat with water. He pulled his goggles up with a shaky hand, saw the world in colour again. His hand was fine. He’d been staring at his glove.

 _Bucky_.

Ty was lying by his side, still tethered to Sam, face up. His eyes were hazy. Sam unclipped the cable, crawled to Ty’s side. _I need you to be alive_.

Before Sam could touch him, the young man coughed, gulped air, coughed some more, stronger. Sam folded the wings up—glass and bits of masonry rained down—and scrambled to his knees, then to his feet in two stumbling motions. Even so, he heard someone cheer.

Or laugh. Probably laugh.

_Bucky._

Behind him, the restaurant was a solid wall of flame and smoke, the fire crews already tackling it from a safe distance. ‘I have a civilian here in need of medical attention,’ Sam yelled. He could barely hear himself over the ringing in his ears. ‘Crush injury to the left leg, likely smoke inhalation.’ Two paramedics were already wheeling in a stretcher, taking vital signs, fitting an oxygen mask. Sam knew he was supposed to finish the handover, but he didn’t wait, couldn’t wait. He turned around, scanned the rest of the street.

Bucky was lying on his side, the shield sitting upside down, close to his head. He’d hit a car jumping out of the restaurant, had left a big dent on the bodywork. Sam hurried to his side, stepped around the two idiot kids without a look. Right now he just wanted to be selfish.

‘Bucky.’ He kneeled down. Pain was flowing back into his chest and he’d probably pulled something permanently doing that little stunt in the restaurant, but it didn’t matter. ‘Buck.’

‘Ow.’ He rubbed his eyes with his flesh hand, looked up at Sam. ‘Hey.’

‘Idiot,’ Sam said, his voice steady and his insides giddy with relief, drowning in it. ‘I—shit.’ His hand had just brushed the metal of Bucky’s left arm.

‘Sorry.’ Bucky said. ‘Outside’s still hot.’

‘Told you I was going to have to rescue your ass again.’

Bucky sat up. ‘Exactly according to my definitely not half-assed plan,’ he said with a wince, and touched the side of his head through the helmet.

‘Are you OK? Are you injured?’

‘No. You know how fast I heal. You?’

‘I’m fine.’ He was going to feel all of this tomorrow, but he was fine. Now he was fine.

Bucky smiled at him with just the corner of his mouth, then grabbed Sam’s hand, pulled them both to their feet, and flipped the shield up to his arm with a kick of his heel. Someone—a kid with a phone, standing behind a barrier—shouted ‘Caps! Hey, Caps!’ and Bucky’s smile vanished. He pulled an injector pen out of his belt and leaned over the girl, jabbing her in the thigh before her groggy mind had enough time to even notice he was there.

‘Do better next time, kid,’ he said, just before she drifted into full unconsciousness. He raised his head, called out to the emergency crews. ‘These two need to go into custody. She’ll be out for a while.’

Bucky stayed and watched until the girl was loaded into a transport, so Sam stayed too. There was a bevy of news crews now, the watchful eyes of flashes and camera lenses. It unnerved Bucky, Sam knew, this kind of attention, sometimes more than when talking heads or politicians shredded him on this or that TV channel, sometimes almost as much as when they shredded Sam. Bucky said nothing, just turned his face away as much as he could, tension knotting up under the uniform.

‘She’s nothing like you,’ Sam said once she was gone, maybe to a second chance. ‘You know that, right?’

‘I know.’ They hurried towards the car. ‘Two kids too dumb to know what they were doing or what they were messing around with. And they could have killed dozens of people.’

Sam didn’t reply until they were inside the car, winding their way past a fire truck and a snarl of traffic barriers and police cars. Flashing lights bounced off the windshield. Sam was sure his ears were going to be ringing with wailing sirens for at least twenty-four hours.

‘They didn’t kill dozens of people.’ He looked at Bucky, sitting in the passenger seat. Without the goggles on, Sam could see him, really see him, the concrete dust still clinging here and there to his uniform, the tiny burn marks on his chin that would be gone by nightfall, the downcast eyes. Without the wingpack on, Sam could lean back into his seat when it all hit him like it always did, the pain and the exhaustion and the nausea, the fear like two handfuls of ice in his lower back. He saw charred flesh, could almost smell it again. ‘They could have killed you. Of all the boneheaded moves, even by your standards…’

Bucky said nothing.

‘I’m sorry. That was uncalled for.’ Sam took a hand off the steering wheel and touched Bucky’s shoulder, the white star on his cooled metal arm, his thigh. He couldn’t stop himself, as though Bucky would crumple to nothing if Sam’s hand didn’t make sure he was there. ‘I’m just—I’m so glad you’re alive, you...’ If there was more to it, he couldn’t get it out. It all stuck together in his throat.

Bucky looked at him and there was the smallest sliver of a smile, just for a moment. ‘Get us out of here, Sam.’

***

**TBC…**


	6. Chapter 6

**6.**

Sam drove north to no destination, just away from downtown, away from flashing lights and TV cameras. He kept going until he couldn’t hear any sirens, then hit the brakes and pulled the car a little haphazardly into the first empty parking spot he saw. Two blocks away, the glass walls of the Howard Metro stop glinted in the sun while the city went about its business.

‘Sam.’

His adrenaline levels were crashing, turning his muscles to water balloons under his skin, ready to pop. Inside his gloves, his palms felt sweaty; his fingers were gripping the steering wheel hard enough to hurt.

‘Sam.’

He turned to Bucky, who had grabbed a small strip of antiseptic gauze from his utility belt.

‘You’re bleeding,’ he said, and dabbed at the side of Sam’s jaw, just next to his goatee. Sam hadn’t noticed the cut, but now it stung like a mother. ‘Will you hold still?’

‘I am.’

‘You’re squirming like a baby.’ Bucky’s hand stopped moving for a second, then reached up across Sam’s cheek in a slow caress. Sam let go of the steering wheel and looked at Bucky, a real look this time, before he reached up with his thumb to wipe away a streak of soot off Bucky’s face.

_Lucky. You’re this lucky._

The shrill beep of a message alert cut in. Sam glanced at the car screen. There was an incoming call on the Avengers’ hotline, where people could report something or call for help. _Who do we answer to?_ Steve had said, back when he’d been the one under the shield’s weight. _The same people we work for. Everyone._

Either everyone mattered or nobody mattered.

They could let someone else take the call. The rest of the team knew it was their day off. He exchanged another look with Bucky, a quick one this time, ship to lighthouse. Bucky nodded very slightly, just like Sam knew he would.

Sam set his phone on the handsfree unit and tapped the screen.

‘Hello?’ the voice was thin and high, almost certainly a child.

‘This is Captain America,’ he said.

A loud huff of breath filled the line. ‘Cap! I was hoping it was you.’ American English speaker, mid-Atlantic accent. ‘I need you. She needs you. You have to help her.’

A voice-print analysis showed up on the car’s computer screen. _High likelihood prepubescent female, high likelihood genuine distress._

_Thanks. Tell me something I don’t know._

‘This is the other Captain,’ Bucky said. ‘Can you tell us where you are?’

‘I’m at the—’ Another rustle in the line. ‘—Children’s Hospital. Eighth floor, east ward.’

‘Are you in danger?’ Sam tapped the screen again to start pinpointing the call. ‘Can you get to a safe place?’

‘I…’ A dot flashed on the screen. ‘I have to go.’

‘Wait, don’t—’

The “call ended” sign showed up at the top of the phone screen, blinking a few times like a sad red eye.

They were both still and silent for a split second before speaking, almost in unison.

‘I’ll get the team.’

‘I’ll trace the call.’

Bucky tapped away at the car’s computer screen with his right hand while Sam yanked the phone closer to him so he could work faster.

‘Avengers, this is Barnes—’

A map image was projected up in the air above the phone screen as Sam’s fingers flew over the keys.

‘Wilson and I have an unknown situation at a hospital, possible attack.’

The upper half of Hope van Dyne’s face filled the car screen, the video link grainy and juddery. She was focusing intently on something on her end. ‘—o ahead.’

‘There are civilians involved,’ Bucky went on.

‘Well, we—’

The feed shook wildly and the sound of an explosion filled the speakers. The video chat went black, resumed a second later. Hope’s HMD filled the screen, showing a barren rocky landscape thick with a swarm of mechanical insects. Wanda Maximoff stood several yards away, hovering above the ground in a cloud of red, sending showers of metal parts flying with bursts of energy. Hope raced towards her.

‘A little busy right now!’

Sam zoomed out of the map with a motion of his fingers. ‘Number is a pre-paid phone, call pinged off a cell tower in Baltimore.’

_Shit. That’s in our backyard_. What was going on today? Was there some kind of douchebag convention in the area? VillainCon in DMV?

He glanced at the screen, where Hope shrank small enough to break apart three of the robots with a sideways punch, then sprang back to her normal size. ‘Baltimore? We’re five thousand miles—’

‘Hope? What’s at Baltimore?’ Wanda said just off-screen, then yelled as the swarm of robots grew thick enough to blot out the pale sun and fill the car with the tinny sound of buzzing. ‘Hope, go!’

Hope’s gauntlets grabbed Wanda’s upper arms. ‘Do it!’

The image shrank so fast the feed stuttered to nothing, then filled with a burst of red.

Then there was only empty black.

‘Hope, do you copy?’ Bucky said. ‘Hope?’ A second’s pause. ‘Sam, let’s go.’

Sam was already pulling into traffic. He tossed the phone to Bucky. ‘Tell me where.’

He saw Bucky bring up the map projection again, a floating yellow ghost with a glowing red dot.

Sam tapped the car’s computer screen as he wove into another lane. ‘Calculate fastest route to Baltimore. Bucky, where?’

‘I have two children’s hospitals in a five mile radius. Wait—’ 

_Destination required for exact ETA_ , the car said in its upbeat monotone.

‘Buck—’

Sam swerved around a van and was met with a chorus of car horns as he sped away. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Bucky switch to satellite view, swipe through the images again.

‘Maryland Medical Centre is only six storeys high. Get us to Baltimore Children’s.’

Sam sped up. ‘On it.’

The drive was too long and too short. The same thought kept hammering away inside Sam’s head, like an ill-tempered heart. _Make him stay. Make him stay_.

It was hard, fighting alongside someone you loved, when you’d almost killed each other, when the person you’d ended up falling for was someone you’d rescued before you’d even met him, when you were super-human, when you were not. They’d both always known that.

Today it was harder for Sam.

Only he was never going to ask Bucky to stay behind, no matter how much his insides felt like a ball of cold slush as he and Bucky moved stealthily across the roof of a multi-story garage. The Children’s Hospital stood across the street, a glass and steel oval.

‘Sam, do you see anything?’

Without Redwing, it was a bit like having to see with one eye closed.

‘No. You?’

‘Nope.’

During the drive, Bucky had listened in on all the usual frequencies and a lot of the unusual ones in search of an emergency that could match the call, but nothing had come up, only emergencies that didn’t. Sam zoomed in on the eighth floor windows. All he could see was glass and blinds, dyed red by the HMD. ‘Are you thinking hoax?’

They got very few of those. Firstly, both experience and the voice analysis systems were actually pretty good at telling real distress from fakery.

Secondly, for some reason people weren’t too keen on having someone wearing weapons of mass destruction land in the middle of their potluck.

‘No, but… only one way to find out,’ Bucky said, and drew away from the concrete parapet, looking like a well-oiled machine.

Sam followed, grabbed the back of Bucky’s straps, and—

_don’t fall don’t_

—fired up the propulsors and spread his wings as Bucky took a few running strides.

The knot in his stomach vanished, the thorn thoughts shrank. He was carrying someone bigger and heavier than him and in a few moments his legs and abs would be burning from the flight stance, but he was in the air, under the sun, where everything always felt right, even today. For a handful of seconds there was no hurry, no danger, no mission, nothing but his wings, even with the strain of carrying Bucky, who hated heights but trusted him enough to fly.

Then the roof of the hospital drew close below them, and Sam swooped down to release Bucky.

He hit the ground running and dashed towards the east side of the building while Sam swept around to slow down his momentum. He landed with a thud, tucked in his wings, and hurried to Bucky’s six. They made their way to a service door.

‘Guns holstered.’

‘Goes without saying,’ Bucky replied as he yanked the door open with his metal hand.

There were no alarms blaring this time, nothing more suspicious in the stairwell than worn linoleum and the smell of disinfectant.

‘This way,’ Bucky whispered once they were on the eighth floor. He didn’t need any equipment to hear a footstep at the other end of a hallway, and Sam followed his lead. They walked past a bank of lifts, snuck unseen around a bend of a corridor, only a few yards away from a nurses station where a woman was discussing something with a man holding a folder.

_Trap?_ There were no screams, no gunfire, nothing but ordinary hospital noises. He might not have Bucky’s senses, but he was sure he could even hear an industrial vacuum cleaner, somewhere in the floors above.

It was quieter in the ward itself. A loud squeak sounded out behind a door and they darted to flank it, standing ready, backs to the wall. Something was about to step through the door. Something big. Something like—

A woman in scrubs, wheeling out a hospital bed. There was a tiny kid lying on it, hooked up to an IV.

He was holding a Chewbacca plushie.

Sam stared. The nurse stared back. The kid stared at Sam, then Bucky, then Sam again, and let out a wheeze.

‘Excuse—’

‘Ma’am—’ 

He and Bucky backed up, towards the other wall, and the nurse spoke again before Sam managed to pick up his sentence. ‘Are you looking for…’ She seemed to notice the traces of soot and smoke still clinging to their uniforms and frowned. ‘Is this for a movie or something? Because we weren’t told—’

‘No.’ For a moment Sam didn’t know what to add to that sentence. ‘It’s not for a movie.’

‘We’re the real thing, ma’am,’ Bucky said. ‘And we need to know what’s going on.’

‘Is this some kind of joke?’ she said, her posture tensing up a little. On the hospital bed, the kid squirmed up on his pillows and stared intently.

Sam pulled up his goggles. The world was full of colour again, and the nurse’s hair went from dark red to dark brown. ‘No joke. We had an emergency call from this hospital less than an hour ago.’

She looked at them for a second, but Sam knew it wasn’t his face, which she’d probably had never paid much attention to, that did the trick. It was the way they were standing, Sam’s first responder voice, the layers of kevlar and padded armour and the guns sitting in their holsters.

‘God,’ she whispered. She stepped forward, making sure the kid couldn’t see what she was saying. ‘My shift started four hours ago and no one’s called an emergency code.’

‘My dad says you two aren’t the real Cap.’

The three of them looked at the little boy on the hospital bed, who was sitting up now, chin thrust forward.

Sam’s first thought was that was definitely on the nicer side of the negative criticism they received; the kid had no future in certain news channels. A second though, unkind, unvoiced: _Your dad sounds like a real peach_. A third thought, much stronger: _Is he wrong?_

‘We’re…’ he started.

‘... trying hard,’ Bucky finished, his voice small and quiet despite his stony expression. He turned halfway around, towards the end of the corridor. Sam followed his gaze.

‘You came.’ A little girl was peering out of a door. She stepped out of the room, staring at the two of them, tentative, as though they were an optical illusion that would come undone if she studied it hard enough. ‘You really came.’

Sam looked her down and further down. She was about waist-high to him, but only if you counted her afro puffs.

‘You’re the one who called us,’ he said.

‘Yeah. And now you’re here.’ She balled her hands over her chest and stood on tiptoe for a second, nearly vibrating with excitement.

Sam exchanged a look with Bucky.

‘What’s going on?’ the nurse said, one hand still on the hospital bed. Sam had to admit two armed man maxed out the Stranger Danger meter, Cap uniform or not.

‘I called the Avengers,’ the little girl said with a sigh, as though it was the most self-evident thing in the world.

‘Yeah, umm, Avengers business, ma’am,’ he said to the nurse. ‘We’re… visiting,’ he added limply, before he turned to the girl again and stepped closer to the room.

That seemed to satisfy the nurse enough for her to grumble ‘I got to get you to Radiology’ and start wheeling the bed again. The little boy wheezed out ‘I wanna see the Cap fight!’

The girl went back into the room and the two of them followed, caution still in their step. Inside there were no waiting gunmen, no bombs about to detonate. It was just a hospital room, a talk show on the TV droning in the background, an older girl lying on the bed, eyes closed, an iPod’s buds in her ears. Her skin had the ashiness of long illness and she was wearing a headwrap, but she still looked enough like the younger girl for Sam to guess they were sisters.

‘Maya,’ the older girl muttered and pulled her headphones out with a weak hand, then opened her eyes. ‘I told you to stay…’

Her mouth opened into an O of surprise.

Bucky went to the windows, did a quick check under the bed. Sam looked into the bathroom. The most lethal thing inside the whole room was the half-eaten hospital food sitting on a tray.

‘Oh my god,’ the older girl said, before turning to the younger one. ‘What did you do?’

The little girl ignored her. All of her unblinking attention was on the two uniformed men standing in front of her. Sam couldn’t help but feel a little self-conscious. ‘Are you really the Captains America?’ Her voice was muffled with shyness but she still managed to correctly pluralise Captain America, which was rather impressive. ‘I mean… really really?’

‘I…’ Bucky started, stopped, then started again. When he spoke, it was with a smile, the rare kind. ‘Yeah. Yeah, we are.’

If the little girl was vibrating before, now she resembled an enthusiastic tuning fork. ‘Nikki, they really came.’ She hopped to the side of the bed and pulled on the other girl’s hand. It was slack in her grip. ‘I called them and they came!’

Nikki shifted up on her pillows. She was wearing a nasal cannula and was hooked up to a cardiac monitor. A pulse ox lead dangled from her left hand. ‘I’m sorry.’ She coughed.

Sam stepped towards her. ‘Are you OK? We got an emergency call less than an hour ago from—’ Sam glanced quickly at his phone screen. ‘—410-555-0159. Something going on at the Children’s Hospital, eighth floor, east wing.’

‘That’s my number.’ She let her head loll towards Maya. ‘You used my phone?’ The little girl was suddenly very absorbed in the pattern on the hem of her shirt. Nikki rubbed her forehead. ‘Oh god. Please don’t sue us or something. My little sister has this weird-ass—’ She took a big gulp of air. ‘I mean, she’s y’all’s biggest fan. She didn’t mean to do anything wrong, I swear.’ 

‘It’s all right,’ Sam said. ‘No harm done.’

‘They can’t sue me if it’s _actually_ an emergency,’ Maya said, enunciating the word “actually” like she’d recently learned to spell it. ‘I didn’t really lie.’

Bucky seemed amused by that, but when he spoke his tone was earnest. ‘You sound like a very clever little girl.’

Maya beamed. ‘I’m in Gifted and Talented.’

_Lord help us_ , Sam thought. _Life is going to kick her ass._

‘Are your folks around?’

‘You sure everything's all right?’

They’d both spoken at once. Sam glanced quickly at Bucky, then spoke again. ‘You know, if you guys are in some kind of trouble… it’s OK to tell us.’ He assumed his most non-threatening posture, even with his uniform still carrying some of the debris of the day. ‘Even if it’s the kind of thing you’d rather not tell anyone else.’

The older girl rolled her eyes a little, then managed a weak smile. ‘No, no after-school special. Everything’s fine. Well, hospital-fine.’

‘My sister is dying,’ Maya said, matter-of-factly enough to make Sam’s heart tighten for a second.

‘Wow, thanks a lot,’ Nikki said in a wheeze. ‘I’m not dying.’ When she spoke again, she was struggling for air. ‘Sorry. Not used… to celebs… in my room.’

‘It’s OK.’ Sam hurried to her side, scanned the monitor. ‘You need more oxygen.’

She shook her head. ‘Used to it.’

He took in the swelling in her fingers, the throws piled up on her bed despite the warm day, the eyes heavy with sleeplessness. He recalled one of the signs they’d passed on their way into the ward. ‘Congestive heart failure?’

‘Yeah.’ Her breathing was a little steadier now. Sam sat down on the chair by the bed. With the wingpack on, the chair felt too flimsy, but it held just fine. ‘I’m on the transplant list.’ She trailed off. Her sister stood by the bed, fingers worrying the fringe on one of the throws.

Bucky stepped a little closer to her. ‘How about we open a window?’ he said.

She brightened. ‘Will that help Nikki?’

‘Well, a good draft used to help my friend Steve when he had trouble breathing,’ Bucky said, and moved towards the window.

‘Steve Rogers?’ she said in an excited squeak as she bounced to his side. Sam knew Bucky thought he wasn’t good with kids anymore, but kids sure were good with him. They didn’t seem to realise he was supposed to look intimidating.

‘That’s right.’

‘I don’t think those windows even open,’ Nikki said.

‘That’s OK, me and Steve’s old window didn’t close,’ Bucky said. ‘We can give it a try.’

‘Yeah! And you’ve got…’ She stumbled over her words in embarrassment, until Bucky held up his metal arm.

‘That’s right, I’ve got the arm.’

‘Sorry about her,’ Nikki said, but her face was still and soft as she watched her sister raise a tentative finger towards Bucky’s outstretched hand, after she asked if she could touch it. ‘You gotta have better things to do. Saving people.’

‘No, it’s fine,’ Sam said. ‘We don’t have any place to be. And I assume your sister called us for a reason.’

They were silent for a moment while Maya peppered the air with questions. “Did you feel that?” “Can you feel hot or cold?” “Can I touch it again?”

Nikki looked at the ceiling. ‘I had cancer.’ Her head lolled towards Sam. ‘It’s no big, everybody always wants to know. Even if they don’t ask. Ewing’s sarcoma. That’s—’

‘Bone and soft tissue cancer.’

‘Yup.’ She looked back at the ceiling. ‘Turns out, rounds and rounds of chemo and radio to your chest? Not so great for your heart.’ She let out a snort that turned into a bout of cough, gestured at Sam not to get up. ‘But I’m fine. Just waiting for that special guy who’s riding a bike without a helmet.’ She looked a little embarrassed. ‘Uh, I didn’t mean— Sorry.’

‘It’s all right,’ Sam said. ‘You should hear combat medics sometime.’

‘You should hear cancer kids.’ She lay still and closed her eyes, and for a moment Sam felt a dart of panic. She didn’t look asleep. She looked worn down to the bone; touch her and her skin would peel off. Then she opened her eyes again. ‘It’s weird to be talking about my chest with Captain godd— with Captain America. Didn’t think my day was gonna feature that.’

‘If it helps any… I don’t think either Cap Barnes or me saw that one coming either.’

His voice was so flat and earnest she laughed for a few seconds, before a bout of wheezing overtook her. Sam rose to help her sit up, stopped himself before he touched her. ‘You want me to go get your parents or—?’

She clasped his hand before he could finish. Her grip was weak but he could still feel her bones through the swelling in her fingers. ‘’s OK,’ she said once her breathlessness had subsided. ‘Dad’s back in Annapolis. He had to work. Mom went to my grandma’s, she—’

‘I forgot one of my bears,’ Maya said, hurrying back to her sister’s side, Bucky in tow. ‘Princess Ameribear.’

‘She forgot one of her bears.’ Nikki leaned back on the pillows, scratched a patch of wispy curls poking out from under her headwrap. ‘Don’t worry… I’m eighteen. Can vote and everything.’

Sam said nothing. He knew that expression. He’d seen it more than enough times.

‘Sorry,’ Bucky said. ‘You were right about the windows.’

Maya leaned on the railings at the foot of the bed, balancing delicately on the tips of her toes. ‘But everything’ll be OK now,’ she declared, then lowered her eyes. She was far too dark-skinned to blush visibly, but Sam could almost feel the heat radiating off her. ‘Now that the Caps are here. They can fix it. Help you,’ she added.

‘Here we go,’ Nikki said. Maybe she was aiming for world-weary, but there was a thread of anguish in her voice. She turned to Sam. ‘Sorry, she thinks if your name’s Captain America, the sun shines— That you can do anything. Uh, no offense. I didn’t mean…’

‘None taken. We can’t do everything,’ Sam said, and looked at Maya. ‘It’s true. I’m sorry, hon. There’s lots of things we can’t do. And sometimes we make mistakes, too, even though we do our best.’

Maya let out a talking-to-adults sigh, eyes still downcast. ‘I know. I’m eight and a half. I know you can’t do magic and fix things like that just because you’re Captain America. But you’ve got all that science stuff. Superheroes, I mean. Avengers.’ She looked at Bucky. ‘And you’re really strong and you got frozen and you’ve got the arm and—’ She turned to Sam. ‘—you can fly. Not on a plane—actual flying. And that’s why I thought…’

She trailed off. For a few seconds there was only the hum of the television, the rustle of Nikki’s breath. Sam didn’t know these girls, didn’t even know their surname. But he knew this smell, the smell of sick rooms and hospitals, no matter where. The skin under his suit itched.

Bucky stepped a little closer to Maya, not touching her, not saying anything.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Sam told the little girl, hoping it mattered, knowing it didn’t.

The letters were the worst. When people took the time to write, sometimes in stationery you could tell had been bought on purpose, sometimes by hand in laborious calligraphy. _I’ve tried everything. Only you can help me_. And you couldn’t.

‘We don’t know how to build someone a new heart. Believe me, if we could, your sister would have one right now. My wings and Cap Barnes’ arm… they’re not the same at all.’

Maya turned to Bucky, eyes still downcast. ‘The arm… did it hurt when you got it?’

‘ _Maya_ ,’ Nikki snapped.

‘It’s fine,’ Bucky said to the older girl, before he answered Maya. ‘Yeah. It hurt.’

‘A lot?’

‘A lot.’

‘But you—’

‘Girl, come here. Sorry about her,’ Nikki rasped, from the height of her eighteen years. ‘She’s young.’ Maya moved to her side, still trailing a cloud of misery. ‘They can’t fix me, OK? You know they can’t. But I don’t need someone to build me a new heart.’ She patted her sister’s head, the motion laboured. ‘You know I explained to you... what’ll happen. Someone’s going to give me their heart.’

‘Because they won’t need it anymore.’

‘Because they won’t need it anymore. And it may take a while, and afterwards I’m gonna have to stay here and see all kinds of doctors. But then I’ll go home.’

‘I know all that,’ Maya said, in a voice like a rainy day.

‘Then you know I’ll be fine. You didn’t need to call the Avengers.’ Her hand dropped back onto the bed and she stared at some point beyond the wall. ‘I’ll be fine.’ A pause. ‘My cardiologist told me I’ve got a great aorta,’ she added in a wheeze, to no one in particular.

Sam shifted on his chair. The pain in his chest was back and his tiredness had turned into a throb under both temples. He’d been with the wounded and the ill and the dying plenty of times—sometimes he was sure he’d spent all his life doing that—but right now he felt as out of place as a mouse on a wedding cake. They couldn’t leave, though. They were needed.

‘Then how come you don’t want to do it?’ Maya said.

‘What’re you talking about?’

Nikki was a terrible liar.

Maya looked up at her sister. ‘I heard you talking to Elyse when you were still back home.’

‘You were snooping in my room?’ She was trying for anger, Sam was sure. Instead she just sounded exhausted.

‘I didn’t mean to! I just… heard. Heard you tell her you didn’t want to go through with it. I know what’ll happen if you don’t. You won’t come back home, you’ll just _die_.’ She turned to Sam. ‘Caps, you have to save her. Our parents can’t make her do it, but you can save her, I know you can. Because…’ She sniffled under her breath.

Nikki opened her mouth, but instead of speaking, all she managed was a bout of coughing, the bone-shaking kind. Sam helped her lean forward. Bucky materialised at his elbow, a glass of water at the ready. Sam handed it to Nikki once the coughing had subsided a little. Her hand shook as she drank, but she managed. ‘You want us to go?’ he said, low.

‘No.’ She slumped back onto her pillows, gown spotted with spilled water, and tried to look blank. ‘You can stay.’ She looked at Maya. ‘I don’t need anyone… to save me, OK? I’ll do it. I’ll get a new heart… and then I’ll go home. And maybe buy a lock.’

‘Mind if I take a seat?’ Bucky said. He wasn’t really expecting a reply, Sam knew, just took the shield off his back and settled in one of the narrow armchairs that stood by the bedroom wall. The chair was a bit too small for him, but he managed.

Nikki turned to Sam. ‘Sorry about all this,’ she said. ‘It must be, like, mega awkward. You probably just want to go fight some robots or something.’

Sam waited a second before replying. ‘You know what I used to do before I got into the whole superhero thing?’

Maya looked up, eyes still a little damp. ‘Captain Wilson, you used to be a para… um, para—’

‘Pararescue. That’s right. And you can call me Sam.’

She brightened a little at that, then let her gaze turn towards the shield. Bucky was wiping some of the grime away.

‘But after I was a pararescue,’ Sam went on, ‘I worked at the VA. Readjustment counseling, mostly. I guess I got used to listening. All kinds of things.’ He hoped he made it sound easy, even though it wasn’t.

‘Hey, kiddo,’ Bucky said to Maya, a little awkward. ‘Would you, uh, you want to give me a hand with this?’

‘It’s all right, Cap,’ she said solemnly. ‘I know my sister wants to talk about grown-up stuff without me around. You don’t really need my help.’

Bucky didn’t look up, just kept on cleaning the shield. Nothing good had ever happened to him in a hospital and the motion calmed him, Sam knew. ‘Maybe not. But we can all do with a little help. When my little sister was eight-and-a-half, she was always less upset after she helped out with something.’

Maya took a couple of steps towards him. ‘Did she really…?’

‘Yeah. Though between you and me, maybe that was just how our mom got her to do chores.’

‘Where is your sister now?’

He took a second to reply. ‘She’s all grown up.’

He’d left a teenager behind, and had returned to a white-haired woman who’d had a stroke.

Maya stepped a little closer. ‘How old are you?’

‘A hundred.’

‘Wow.’

Sam was sure she would have reacted in the same way if Bucky had said thirty-five.

‘If you hold the shield up for me, this’ll go faster. Think you’re up to it?’

She closed the space between them, touched the shield like it was a holy relic. It was safely braced against the floor and Bucky’s knee, but she still put on her most serious face as she grabbed the rim. It made her look like a very determined kitten.

‘Thanks,’ Nikki said to Sam. She looked like she just wanted to go to sleep again, her wick burned up, but her eyes, though glassy, remained open. ‘You don’t have to stay. I’ll be fine. My sister… doesn’t really understand. But I’m not…’ She lowered her voice. ‘... suicidal or anything. I’m not going anywhere.’

‘Like I said—if you want us to leave…’

‘No, I…’ She rubbed the bridge of her nose, her fingers clumsy. ‘I just don’t need a life lesson. I mean… Christ, I’m sorry. Don’t even know what I say half the time. My mind is all… a mess. Not as bad as all the times when I was having chemo, but…’

‘Hey, it’s OK. It’s OK. A life lesson sounds like the worst idea ever.’ That wasn’t particularly funny, but it still got him a weak smile in response. ‘I know that as it comes to this suit and the shield… a lot of people think it’s dumb.’ Nikki’s expression was blank again, but Sam could tell she didn’t entirely disagree with that assessment. ‘Maybe they’re not wrong. But what it’s really about, it’s helping people. It’s what we do. Don’t worry about robots. If you need us right now, you need us right now. Even something as dumb as Captain America.’

Nikki said nothing, just looked straight ahead, at some point beyond the TV screen.

‘You want to try the shield?’ Bucky was saying to Maya.

He might as well have asked her if she wanted to become Princess Ameribear.

‘Can I?’ she squealed, then turned towards the bed, eyes wider than ever. ‘Captain Sam, can I?’

‘Sure.’

He watched as Bucky helped Maya slip her arm through one of the straps. She was too small for her hand to reach the other one, so Bucky held the shield up for her, took a few careful, tandem steps into the middle of the room.

‘It’s heavy,’ Maya said, face scrunched up with concentration.

‘It takes time to get used to it,’ Bucky said.

‘Cap…’ Nikki said as Maya and Bucky pretended to block an imaginary alien blaster shot. Sam turned to her. ‘Can I ask you a question? You don’t have to answer if you don’t want. I… are you two together? Together-together?’

He was sure the way he’d been looking at Bucky was all the answer anyone needed, but there was always that little knot inside before he answered, no matter what, no matter how relaxed he sounded or if he put a smile on it. ‘Yeah. We’re together-together.’

‘Cool,’ Nikki said. ‘Cool,’ she added, almost in a whisper.

It mattered, Sam knew. It mattered when kids looked at Sam and saw someone who looked like them. It mattered when someone dug a little into Bucky’s history and saw that you could still live. It mattered. Even something as dumb as Captain America.

Nikki spoke again after a moment. ‘It’s just… I don’t want to die.’ Her voice was low, her eyelids nearly closed. ‘I’m just no good at this. At being sick.’

‘Man, I’d hate to meet someone who is.’

‘Ha, can you imagine?’ She grinned weakly. ‘Radiation Sickness Man.’

‘I think he teamed up with Godzilla once.’

‘Hope you kicked their asses.’ She breathed in and out, exhausted from the exchange. ‘I’m not brave. People tell you that all the time. When you’re… a cancer kid. They think it helps. It doesn’t. I… every day… it isn’t a blessing. I don’t live it in full or whatever. I just spend most of the time being too tired to do anything. Not… not being a brave little soldier.’ She closed her eyes. ‘I just got sick when I was eleven, and it sucked. I had three recurrences, and it sucked. Now I’m supposed to be cancer-free and it turns out I need a new heart. And it still sucks.’ She coughed, just once, then raised a stiff hand to her headwrap. ‘My hair is still growing back wrong.’

‘Let’s hold it up like this, kiddo. We’re all counting on you,’ Bucky was saying to Maya. She couldn’t help but let out a tiny shriek of delight.

‘That’s all I could think about after I last went into remission. My hair being wrong,’ Nikki said, and looked at him. ‘God, I don’t know why I’m telling you this. Didn’t even tell my mom.’

‘Sometimes it’s easier to talk to a stranger.’

‘I guess. I mean, you’re on TV all the time, but almost everyone I know is either sick or an MD.’ Her eyes opened. ‘If I get a heart tomorrow… you know how long it’ll last?’

‘There are breakthroughs—’ His brain managed to stop his big mouth in time. ‘Not a long time, huh?’

‘Yeah. My cardiologist kept not giving it to me straight. So I looked it up.’ She paused. ‘50% survival rate at 10 years. Maybe I’ll be one of the 50%. When I had cancer, I used to think… I’d hear a song and think if I’d still be around when the album dropped. Watch a trailer and wonder if I’d get to watch the movie. People would tell me… everything would be great… once I wasn’t sick.’ She stopped for a second to steady her breath. ‘I don’t want to die. I want them to find a match tomorrow. But I… That’s why I said that. What I said. I’m just so tired.’

He could hear the tears in her voice, even though her eyes were dry. ‘It’s all right. It’s up to you.’

‘It’s not.’

‘Yeah, it is.’

‘No, it would kill my mom.’ She swallowed another mouthful of tears. ‘It would kill—’

‘I don’t mean that. Listen, I’m not gonna lie. Life dealt you a crappy hand. And I’ve seen plenty of those, trust me.’ _And in three weeks’ time you’re not even going to remember this one as anything more than another day, another mission._ He hated that voice, hated it for not being all that wrong, hated the fact that he didn’t hate it enough. ‘There’s nothing anybody can do to change that, and yeah, it sucks, and yeah, it’s unfair. As unfair as it gets. But you still get to choose how you carry it.’

Maya approached the bed again, looking collected. Bucky was a few steps behind, the shield on his back again. Nikki let out a half-gasp, half-sob. ‘I’m not…’ she said.

‘I know.’ Sam handed her a tissue from the bedside table. ‘You’re not brave. I’ll tell you a secret: a lot of the time, I’m not really brave either. I just don’t have a choice. People need me.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Nikki said, the tissue wadded up against her face. She dabbed at her eyes. ‘I’m not usually all weepy and emotional like this.’

‘It’s OK. Good at listening, remember?’

‘It’s all right,’ Maya said, every fibre of her small frame serious. She took Nikki’s left hand and placed it on her shoulder. ‘I can help you now. Captain Barnes showed me how to use the shield.’

Nikki let out a laugh, short and damp. ‘You’re a real big help.’ Maya climbed onto the bed and settled at her side as Nikki put her arm around her. ‘I mean it, pumpkin.’

‘Maybe you’ll get to wield it again, when you’re all grown up,’ Bucky said.

‘ _Really?_ ’

‘Yeah. You’ll call yourself Captain Ameribear,’ Nikki said.

‘I have _all_ the bears,’ Maya said. She made it sound like the most spectacular insult backfire of all time. ‘But I don’t have super-strength.’

‘Neither do I,’ Sam said. ‘Hasn’t stopped me yet.’

Maya lifted her head. ‘But you have the wings.’ She looked at Sam expectantly.

‘Do you want to see them?’

She barely managed a nod, her hands balled into fists under her chin. Sam got up, took a step back, and the wings slipped out with a low purr of metal. There wasn’t enough room to extend them fully, and they were just a bit of clever engineering, but still Maya said “Wow”, soundless, as Sam retracted them back into the wingpack, then “Wow” again. Even Nikki’s eyes were a little shiny.

‘Thanks,’ Nikki said, and Sam was sure she wasn’t just talking about the wings. ‘That was cool.’

Maya snuggled against Nikki again and covered up a yawn, worn out by the excitement. ‘D’you really think I could be Cap?’

‘I don’t see why not,’ Bucky said. ‘If I can.’

‘Do you want to know why there’s two of us?’ Sam said as he sat back down.

Maya nodded against her sister’s chest. _Because the day’s not even done yet and you’re rusty with pain and with exhaustion, because two half caps almost make a full one, because_ —

‘It’s because the shield isn’t about just one person. It’s about…’ He paused for a second. ‘Sometimes there’s something you know is the right thing to do. But it’s really difficult or hard, or you think you’re not the right person for it. So you think you’ll never be able to do it. But what the shield is about is telling you “why not? why can’t I? what’s stopping me?”.’ He looked up, met Bucky’s eyes, and for a second they were as close as two people could get. ‘Being Cap is bigger than me, or Captain Barnes, or Captain Rogers.’

‘Okay,’ Maya said. She didn’t get it, Sam was sure, not yet, but one day she would.

‘How about you, Captain Barnes?’ Nikki had turned her head to Bucky. ‘I bet you have some advice too.’ She was being a little sarcastic, but it was the friendly kind.

‘Uh.’ He had the helmet on, but Sam could see his _I’m not good at this_ expression just fine. ‘Always fight fascism. When you’re older.’

Nikki smiled just a little. Maya looked like she was filing the big words away for future investigation. She covered up a yawn, lay back on her sister’s shoulder.

For a few moments none of them said anything. Then Nikki nodded with her chin towards the TV screen. ‘Look at the news,’ she said. A segment showed footage from the DC fire, too brief to really show anything, but long enough for Sam to feel the usual embarrassment.

Maya lifted her head. ‘Did anyone got hurt?’

‘Well,’ Bucky started, a little hesitant, before Sam could answer. ‘We saved everyone.’

For now, that seemed to be enough. Maya settled back down, snuggled next to her sister. Nikki breathed, one lungful at a time. Sam felt his body grow slack with tiredness in the warm room.

A phone on the nightstand started vibrating. Sam reached for it, passed it to Nikki.

‘Hi, mom. … Yeah. …’ A quick cough. ‘No, I’m fine. … I’m fine. … No. … Uh-uh. ... OK, see you then.’ She ended the call. ‘My mom’ll get here in about twenty minutes.’

Sam nodded. ‘We’ll be on our way.’

Maya opened her mouth, maybe to protest, but instead she just yawned again, tired out.

‘Wait,’ Nikki said, as Sam started to get up. ‘Do you…’ she lowered her eyes, then looked up at him. ‘Can you stay a little longer?’

A quick glance at Bucky. ‘Yeah,’ Sam said. ‘We can stay.’ He put his hand on the edge of the bed, not too far from Nikki’s, let it stay there until it was time to leave.

***

**TBC…**


	7. Chapter 7

**7.**

By the time Bucky pulled into the driveway of their home, the sun was starting to set, tinging the sky with pink and gold and red. Bucky engaged the handbrake and turned off the ignition, but instead of getting off the car, he remained in his seat, his right thumb tracing a slow line on the underside of the steering wheel.

Sam didn’t move either. He saw a girl with red-gold hair, strapped to a gurney, thumbprints of soot on her face. A much younger girl, halfway to sleep. The thoughts didn’t bother him. They just drifted by like summer clouds.

‘What a day,’ Bucky said.

‘You can say that again.’

‘What a day.’

‘Smartass.’

‘You asked for it.’ He rapped his fingertips on the steering wheel, once, twice. ‘I’m sorry.’

Sam turned to him. Bucky had taken his helmet off when they’d started the drive home from Baltimore and the dying sun took five years and a lifetime—two lifetimes—off his face.

‘If we get going now, we’ll get there while there’s still daylight,’ Bucky went on, still looking straight ahead. ‘We can take my bike, that’ll be quickest. I won’t even make you ride pillion.’ He was silent for a few seconds, and Sam knew he was having a hard time pushing the words out. ‘Sorry I screwed up. I already said it, but I guess it’s worth saying again. I can be a real drip sometimes, you know. Even you must have figured that one by now.’

‘Yeah, it may have come up.’ There had been nothing sharp in Bucky’s words, though, and there was nothing sharp in Sam’s words now. He wanted to reach out with his hand, run his fingertips over the sensitive skin of Bucky’s throat, just above the suit’s collar. Instead, he put his hand on Bucky’s thigh.

‘It’s just—’ Bucky went on, ‘I know it’s the anniversary. The day Riley died.’ Well, there it was. Some small part of Sam expected or wanted the words to sound bigger, but they just sounded like any other set of words, even coming from Bucky’s mouth. The rest of Sam had already known they would. Things just kept on keeping on. ‘So all that stuff I wanted to do with you today was— I don’t know, I thought it’d help you not think about it. Maybe you could just have some good times instead of bad. Sometimes that helps. For me, at least.’

Bucky turned to him, a haze of dying sunlight haloing his hair. ‘But you can’t really do that, can you? Things aren’t all right just because you pretend they are. There’s stuff you can never get rid of. You lost someone you cared about and he died in the worst way and there isn’t anything I can do about that. It matters. It should matter. I shouldn’t have thought I could make it not matter. It’s… disrespectful.’

 _It’s all right_ , Sam wanted to say. _I know you were only trying to help_. He could feel the words, even, moving from his mind to his tongue. But instead his hand just squeezed Bucky’s leg through the heavy fabric before it dipped a little onto Bucky’s inner thigh. His eyes moved towards the windshield, to the licks of red light on the car’s hood. Fire on flesh and fabric and twisted metal wasn’t red. It was a sickly orange, even at night.

‘It made me real mad for a while.’ _Those_ words, Sam hadn’t felt. They just shot out of his mouth, bypassing his brain. And then the next ones trickled out, because it was easier with Bucky, with someone who knew what it was like to have everybody, starting with yourself, desperately need you to be OK. Easier, but still hard. ‘Mad that you and Steve were alive. That sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?’

They looked at each other. For a second, neither of them said anything, then Bucky placed his flesh hand over Sam’s and Sam went on.

‘I think some part of me wondered what made Steve so special. Why did he get to crash a plane and come out of it in a costume instead of in a body bag. But when you’ve got demi-gods and aliens pulling some shit in Times Square, well, questions like that don’t really matter so much. And then I met him and I could tell he was just like any other poor dumbass who’s trying to grin and bear it, you know?’

‘Boy, do I ever.’

They both smiled a little at that, half-bitter, half-sweet, before Sam spoke again. ‘You know, the second time I met him, he asked me if I’d lost someone, which was his way of telling me _he_ ’d lost someone. We were just two guys who got it. And then you showed up.’

‘Totalled your car, you mean.’ _Nearly killed you._

‘Which wasn’t even paid for yet, by the way. Never forget.’ He looked at the driveway and his tone turned flat again. ‘And I couldn’t help but think—’ He couldn’t say it, even now. Instead, he gently pushed Bucky’s hand off and turned his own palm up, so they could lace their fingers together.

‘—why this asshole?’ Bucky finished, in the kind of voice that almost always made Sam laugh, but right now just made him want to hold Bucky close, stand by him until all the bad things went away.

Only things didn’t leave. Like the dead, they lingered and watched.

‘I don’t know what he was like,’ Bucky said, the jokey tone gone. ‘He was your friend, that’s good enough for me. He deserved better. I can go with you, if you’d like. To Arlington. Or I can leave you alone and wait for you. I’ll do whatever you want. Even nothing, if that’s what you need.’

Sam didn’t reply, and for a good long while, they were both silent. Bucky rubbed Sam’s thumb with his and Sam held on to his hand.

He could feel the heat and the sweat inside his fingerless glove, but right now all he could think of was that time when he’d first realised he was falling helplessly and irrevocably in love with James Buchanan Barnes, when he’d grabbed Bucky mid-air and the two of them had crashed through a window in a tangle of wings and broken glass. ‘Idiot,’ Sam had said, and Bucky, his side soaked with blood from shrapnel, had opened his eyes again and said ‘Are you OK? Did you get hit?’

When Sam had thought _you almost killed yourself_ and _don’t do that to me_ and—the sensible part of him— _Samuel Thomas Wilson, you better know what you’re doing_. When he couldn’t help but want to go back in time and kick Bucky harder when they’d first met, in the worst circumstances, for doing this to him. When he’d felt, under the worry and the adrenaline, a bone-deep sense of _rightness_.

Was it wrong, to think about that right now? Well, there it was anyway. Like gravity, even when you had wings.

‘I go on his birthday,’ Sam said, finally. ‘That’s the kind of stuff I want to remember.’ Bucky nodded, once. ‘I used to go see his mom today, before she moved to New Mexico. Now I just call her.’

‘How is she doing?’

Awkward talk, awkward coffee. Photos on the mantlepiece, staring down. ‘Better.’ Not really true. Time didn’t heal a good goddamn.

He turned to Bucky. ‘You know, when I first shipped out, I thought I might at least help. That others may live. Someone’s got to do it, especially when everything is bad as it can get. After a while, though, all the stuff I saw other there… A lot of the time I ended up thinking Riley and I were just making things worse. Just bullshit piled on bullshit. But some people got to live for a little while longer, I guess, and most of all I had Riley’s back and he had mine. That mattered. Then he died. Guess I didn’t see much of a reason for anything after that.’

He stared at the windshield for a while. Bucky squeezed his hand.

‘Took me a long time to feel that again. That I had someone’s back.’ Once he was stateside for good, it had taken him a long time to feel like getting out of bed for a reason other than his body’s force of habit. To stop watching infomercials at 3am, the idea of changing the channel or going to sleep an insurmountable chore.

‘I guess that’s what it means,’ Sam went on. ‘This star on my chest. Why I said yes to being Cap. We lose people and we mess up and sometimes I think we’re not making any real difference. But if even a single life is saved… if it makes a difference for just one person, well, that’s good enough for me.’

His throat felt a little dry and his head ached, but he didn’t mind it. It was good pain.

‘That was some speech, Sam,’ Bucky said, then the corner of his mouth twitched. ‘Sorry—I meant, that was some speech, Cap.’

‘I’ve been working on a whole set since I started wearing the suit.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Got to live up to the uniform.’

Neither of them said anything for a few seconds, then Bucky pressed the tip of a metal finger to Sam’s shoulder. With the wingpack off, there was a tiny white star visible where two seams met in the padded fabric. ‘You do. I promise. And… I shouldn’t have risked my life in the fire. Not today. It was thoughtless.’

‘It was the right call.’

Bucky said nothing for a few seconds, his fingers still on Sam’s shoulder. ‘Sometimes I’m not sure I know what that is. The right call. I guess that’s why I said yes to being Cap. I know what the shield means, at least. All I had to do was try to live up to it, even if I’m not any good at that. And when I started, maybe I didn’t really want it, but… Now I want to be worthy of it. I want to deserve it. I want to deserve you. I know I can’t undo things. But maybe I can balance them out just a little.’

‘Not bad for someone who’s terrible at speeches, Cap,’ Sam said. ‘And no one’s better than you, Bucky. No one. I promise.’ He raised their entwined hands, just as Bucky leaned in towards him, until their foreheads were nearly touching.

It wasn’t true, what Bucky had said about today, that there was nothing he could do that would make a difference. Time might not cure all wounds, but Bucky was here, close enough for Sam to feel the rise and fall of his breath, the warmth of his skin and the weight of his hand. You could think that maybe all would be well. ‘Thanks, Buck.’ He went on before Bucky could speak. ‘For having my back. For having other people’s back. For today.’

Bucky smiled wanly. ‘Gee, imagine if I’d bought tickets to the opera or something, though.’

‘Like they’d let you in.’

‘You sure have a big mouth for a fella who watches _The Bachelorette_.’

They looked at each other and Sam thought this was as good as it got on a day like today. Letting yourself be happy despite it all, not hating yourself for it. There was a way to carry your scars after all, big or small.

‘I’m going to let go of your hand now, all right?’ he said.

‘Getting really sweaty, huh?’

‘Yup.’

‘I thought you’d never ask.’ Bucky wiped his glove on his trousers. ‘Hey, you want to stay here like a loser, or do you want to enjoy the _pièce de résistance_?’

‘Is it you swearing in French?’

‘ _Ferme ta bouche, sale con_ ,’ Bucky said as he got out of the car.

‘Uh-uh. You know I understood that, right?’

Bucky rested one arm on the open door and looked back into the car. ‘Come on, Sam. I…’ He blushed a little, and when he spoke again his tone was soft and a little hesitant. ‘There’s a surprise.’

‘Well, in that case.’ Sam took some moments to grab the shield, make sure the wingpack was fully secure in the trunk, and lock the car, and by the time he made it into the house, Bucky was already in the living room, holding something behind his back.

‘Did you find the missing remote battery?’

‘Even better,’ Bucky said, and handed him a DVD case. ‘A little something for my best guy.’

Sam looked at the DVD cover, blinked, then looked at it again. ‘Holy shit. _Birdemic Zero_.’ He ran a finger over the photoshopped eagles on the cover, flying majestically over a biohazard sign. ‘It’s not supposed to be out for another month.’

Bucky edged a little closer. ‘I’ll have you know I can be very persuasive when I want to.’

‘I already know,’ Sam said, and took a small step forward. Another one and he’d close the distance between them. He could smell the trace of smoke still clinging to Bucky’s uniform, and he knew how the skin on the corner of his lips would taste, salty and warm.

‘Do you want…’ Bucky said. He sounded tentative, the DVD still in his right hand, and when his left hand moved onto Sam’s waist, the same fingers that could crush steel and concrete and bone were feather-light.

On their first date, which hadn’t been a real date, they’d watched _The Birds_ at some hipster cinema in Williamsburg, the kind where they served beer and where they could both feel awkward. Sam had shown Bucky the _Birdemic_ duology, because it turned out Bucky loved awesomely terrible films, and half an hour into the first one he’d realised that of course Bucky hadn’t watched _The Birds_ —he’d been asleep under ice, or worse, he hadn’t—and that needed to be corrected as soon as possible.

‘You didn’t tell me this one was actually a good movie!’ Bucky had said after as they’d walked to the parking lot under a soft drizzle (later, he told Sam he’d felt like patting himself on the back for being surrounded by people making noise and moving and maybe looking and still managing to mostly pay attention to the movie, and wasn’t that the _dumbest_ thing you’d ever heard?).

Sam couldn’t even remember what kind of bullshit they’d said to each other after that, but the rest was etched deep under his skin: concrete and chicken wire, the bile-yellow haze of street lights splashing on parked cars. Bucky’s face, damp and a little shiny with mist, a drop of rain on the cleft of his chin. Then Bucky’s hands on him, the metal one on Sam’s waist, the flesh one on Sam’s back, _yes, I want this, yes_. A quick glance at the parking lot to make sure no one was watching, because there was always the bitter even in the sweet, then craning his neck up just a little to meet Bucky’s lips with his. Right after, with the taste of Bucky and the rain still in Sam’s mouth, Bucky had said ‘I thought you were going to kiss me proper’ and Sam had cupped his face in his hands and said ‘So that’s how you’re playing it, uh?’ before he’d kissed him again.

‘Come here,’ Sam said now, and drew him a little closer, the shield at their side like a spare wing. Bucky gripped his waist harder, nuzzled his face, but it was Sam who kissed first, eyes closed, slow and deep.

Bucky broke away with a soft noise just as Sam opened his eyes again. His right hand was resting on the nape of Bucky’s neck, rubbing the downy skin below his hairline as Bucky leaned forward to place little across on Sam’s cheek.

‘Been thinking…’ Bucky whispered against his skin, ‘we should go…’

He didn’t finish the sentence. Sam’s hand dipped down to his back and they stumbled towards the bedroom. When their legs tangled together in the doorway, Bucky slipped the metal arm around Sam, then lifted him almost effortlessly into his arms, DVD case still hanging off two fingers of his right hand.

Sam let out a little huff of surprise. ‘Playing it sexy?’ he said, but instead of replying Bucky took a few steps and the two of them landed on the bed with a loud groan of the frame, kevlar and padding and mesh pressed together, the shield slipping off Sam’s hand and sliding a few inches across the mattress. Sam had no time to think about it. He just hoisted himself up and ran his tongue over the underside of Bucky’s jaw, the sensitive skin of his throat. He relished in the low moan the other man let out, the press of Bucky’s shoulder holster against his right arm.

‘That’s… ah, that’s the plan,’ Bucky said when Sam stopped, and made a motion to pull away.

Sam grabbed his arm. He was a sensible guy, knew they needed to store the shield, store their equipment, put away the uniforms, take a shower. But he needed this, right now, like he needed air, body to body, skin to skin. He needed to feel Bucky wanting him, to taste the salt and sweat on his skin, to taste _him_. Maybe it was the adrenaline crashing. Wanting to feel alive after a brush with death. Wanting to feel something, to feel close. Wanting.

‘Who says all your plans are terrible?’

Bucky grinned, face flushed with arousal, and stood on all fours above Sam, his knees straddling Sam’s hips. His hair hung down. ‘You do.’

Sam reached up, ran a hand over the front of Bucky’s uniform, over the white star on his chest. Despite the thickness of the material, he could still see and feel the smooth heaviness of muscle. His fingers moved onto Bucky’s throat, reached up to lose themselves in Bucky’s hair. ‘Really? I guess I’m an idiot.’

The flush on Bucky’s cheeks deepened and there was that rare smile, the one that always felt like the sun shining in the dark, as though Bucky couldn’t quite believe he was allowed to feel this good. ‘I’ve been saying that for _years_.’

Sam swatted his side with his other hand. ‘You’re lucky you’re this good-looking.’ And then, more serious, just as Bucky started stroking his neck with his right hand: ‘God, you’re beautiful.’ He cupped Bucky’s cheek, the place where he still had a little grime from the fire.

‘Nah, you’re the cute one.’ That was his boy all over, unable to see a little of something in himself if he didn’t first see it wholeheartedly in someone else. ‘A real stunner. Especially when you’re wearing your best smile. I mean, hot damn.’

Bucky was bigger and stronger, but Sam had no trouble pulling him down and rolling him onto his back. Sam settled on top of him, their bellies pressed together, Sam’s thighs around Bucky’s hips. His uniform felt tight and hot in a way that had nothing to do with the layers of padding, and he was sure he could feel a half-mast erection through the fabric on Bucky’s crotch. ‘You’re saying you want me out of this uniform?’ he managed to get out while he pressed the side of his face against Bucky’s. One hand pinned Bucky’s right wrist to the mattress, the other was still tangled in Bucky’s hair, drawing him close.

Bucky planted hot little kisses on his cheek, his nose, his chin. ‘I’ll bribe you—’ His voice had turned low and throaty and sank straight to Sam’s lower belly. When he let out a soft gasp and ground his hips upwards, Sam stilled him with a gentle squeeze of his legs. ‘—to keep it. On.’

‘Yeah?’ He kissed him on the mouth again, even slower this time, tasting Bucky like a fine wine, heat and peppermint and a trace of smoke. Underneath him, Bucky was yielding and welcoming, the metal hand cool on the small of Sam’s back, even through layers of fabric, the edge of Bucky’s boot rubbing against his shin.

Sam thrust his hips slowly against Bucky, once, twice, just enough to make Bucky press a whimper to his tongue. The urge to move again, to feel that delicious friction, made every nerve from his thighs to his navel ache, and Bucky’s left hand was gently prodding him onwards, but Sam made himself remain teasingly still.

He broke the kiss off, lifted his head a fraction. They were both breathing quick and hard now, Bucky’s eyes glassy with arousal, his lips still parted and a little red.

He wanted to see Bucky come undone while still wearing the white star emblazoned on his chest, under his hands, fall together in a tangle, sweaty with exhaustion and pleasure. A want like a blade inside his flesh.

‘Hell, Sam,’ Bucky groaned, in between two breaths. ‘Don’t just stand there all night...’

He stirred under Sam’s hold and Sam let go of his wrist, propped his weight on one hand while he mussed Bucky’s hair with the other. ‘You talk too much.’

‘Make me stop.’ His hand left Sam’s back. His eyes grew a little more focused and he squirmed up on the bed. ‘Hang on—let me get—’ Then his metal arm slipped and hit Sam right in his cracked rib.

***

**TBC…**


	8. Chapter 8

**8.**

After he freaked out for a bit in the bedroom, Bucky kept apologising as the two of them showered, something which was made a lot more amusing by the fact that his erection was still going strong, like an unwanted houseguest who couldn’t pick up on what his hosts were putting down. He kept trying to camouflage it through strategic deployment of foam and washcloths, too, which in any other circumstances would have had Sam laughing until he teared up.

Right now, though, all Sam could muster the energy for was standing up, half his weight leaning on Bucky, and letting the lukewarm water beat down on his throbbing chest and aching legs and back. After seeing stars ( _and stripes_ , his brain added helpfully) for about a minute, the heat inside him was gone and all he could feel was the weight of exhaustion and a long day, everything else draining away like soapy water.

Once they finished showering and Sam managed to convince Bucky that his rib wasn’t any more damaged than before—he was just going to have a nasty bruise—they cleaned and stored the equipment like grown-ups, then Sam put a super-soldier-sized pizza in the oven and unbagged a salad while Bucky locked the house up. After dinner, Bucky made Sam sit down with an icepack while he did the dishes. You could carry a shield made of the rarest metal on earth and wear a suit stitched with history, face off against tentacle monsters from another dimension, but you still procrastinated on your paperwork and had to take out the trash bags and make phone calls you didn’t want to make.

If you were lucky, you found someone who went into the kitchen and closed the living room door behind him when you reached for the phone, without either of you having to say a word.

‘Scoot over,’ Bucky said as he climbed into bed. As usual, he’d left the bathroom door ajar so the soft haze of the nightlight could seep into the bedroom. Tonight, though, where his left arm should be there was only a metal stump ending just below the shoulder joint, the attachement covered up by a cap of rubberised fabric.

‘You didn’t have to take your arm off,’ Sam said. He’d seen Bucky naked before he’d seen him willingly without the arm, and they’d had sex by the time Bucky awkwardly asked him for help rubbing some cream into the seam where flesh met metal. Sam still remembered that, clear as day, Bucky sitting very still, flesh hand balled into a tight fist on his lap, breathing in the scent of antiseptic and aloe vera. ‘Unless you took a crack at me on purpose…’

‘Oops.’ Bucky nudged his arm gently, then settled down on Sam’s left. He usually slept on the other side of the bed. ‘It’s fine. Neural uplink needed a rest anyway.’ Once, Sam had asked him what it felt like when he took off the artificial arm, and Bucky had cocked his head and one eyebrow for a moment, then replied with _Like your arm is completely numb and also like it’s made of wadded-up paper_.

‘All right,’ Sam said, and edged away a little so he could give Bucky more room and grab the DVD remote. The icepack shifted as he moved and needle-teeth of pain bit a little deeper into his side, even numbed by the cold and the opioids.

‘You OK?’

Damn. He was sure he’d bitten down that wince good and proper.

‘Just aching a little. No biggie.’ He glanced at Bucky as the movie’s opening titles—the production values were better in this one, so they’d got the _classy_ WordArt—appeared on the TV screen, then he put his left arm around the other man’s shoulders, like a kid pretending to yawn in a movie theatre. _Real smooth_. His hand settled on the seam between warm flesh and cool metal and Bucky shifted a little to draw closer to him. ‘It’s all good.’

‘Are you sure?’ Bucky put his hand on Sam’s thigh and looked back at the screen. ‘Oh man. _Birdemic Zero: The Origin_ with a yellow hazard sign blocking out half the letters. Now that’s what I call art.’

‘Yeah.’ Sam let his head rest on Bucky’s, ran his fingers over the back of Bucky’s hand. ‘Yeah. I’m good.’

He could feel the fog again, a wet sandbag inside his skull. It was heavy, and sticky, and the colour of nothing.

You could have gravity and a compass needle, though, anchoring you even when you couldn’t see a thing. He nestled into the weight and warmth of Bucky’s body, and despite his exhaustion managed to smile to himself at the ridiculous blue-and-red briefs Bucky was wearing with his plain white undershirt. Yeah. He was good.

‘Aces,’ Bucky said, his voice mellow, and shifted his position down a little, so that the side of his head rested on the curve of Sam’s neck. His hand moved down to Sam’s knee, thumb and fingertips tracing slow circles on the taut skin. Sam turned his head around a little so he could kiss Bucky’s hair. It was still a little damp and smelled faintly of herbal shampoo.

The movie had progressed all the way to a scene allegedly set in a top-secret research facility—‘I think I’ve been to that IHOP,’ Sam said—by the time the feel of Bucky against him turned, little by little, into a shiver, a sweet-sharp tug on each nerve end.

He was slack with tiredness, almost groggy with it, but his fingers rubbed the slope of Bucky’s shoulder, dipped down to brush the hollow above his collarbone. His thumb caressed the soft skin on Bucky’s neck. Bucky let out a happy little sigh in response and his hand moved up Sam’s leg, massaged his inner thigh, each slow stroke making Sam’s groin twitch.

When Bucky finally spoke, it was in a voice like liquor and honey. ‘Do you… do you wanna take your shirt off?’

Sam wanted to lie back and sink into the pillows while Bucky’s hand went to work on him, but even more than that, he wanted to see Bucky’s mouth on his bare belly, tracing a line from his chest to his navel.

The icepack slid down and Sam’s chest tightened with pain as he pulled his t-shirt off, but right now the ache was miles away.

‘Oh, geez. I’m so sorry.’ Bucky was looking at the patch of slightly puffy flesh where he’d accidentally struck Sam’s chest, voice no longer mellow, just tight with concern. ‘Are you still in pain? Do you want me to—’

‘Hey. I got plenty worse today.’ Sam cupped Bucky’s face with his right hand. He felt boneless with exhaustion, felt a thousand little thoughts needling the edge of his mind, but here and now all that mattered was Bucky’s skin against his, the heat pooling in his lower belly, between his legs. He pictured Bucky’s hand slipping under his waistband. ‘Besides, you can kiss it better.’

Bucky grinned at that, this time the lopsided, eyebrow-raised half-smirk that was a hell of a lot naughty and a hell of a lot nice and always went straight to Sam’s cock. Bucky lay down on his side, propped up on his elbow, and ran his fingers over the sensitive spot just above Sam’s hipbone. ‘Let me guess, you injured your dick too. Probably your ass as well.’

‘There may have been a ricochet.’

‘Physics sure works in funny ways,’ Bucky muttered, and leaned over to kiss him. Sam held his face in his hands, closed his eyes so he could draw in his scent, the sheer weight and mass of Bucky’s super-human body, hard and soft, the taste of his mouth.

He let Bucky pull away with a little moan and leaned back on the pillows, one hand stroking Bucky’s hair. On the flatscreen, a man said “—they’ve agreed to fund us by _one billion dollars_ ” while the bottom of a boom mic hovered above him, and a little part of Sam’s mind managed to think _Christ, I hope I don’t create some weird association_.

‘Better?’ Bucky whispered against his jaw.

‘Better,’ Sam muttered, and Bucky teased the skin of his throat with his tongue, mouthed the hollow at the base of Sam’s neck. Bucky’s hand was still stroking his side, and Sam felt his cock stiffen a little. His left hand left Bucky’s hair, slid down to his neck, and settled on the taut muscles between his shoulderblades. Bucky’s back was a little damp with sweat. Sam found it mind-meltingly hot.

Bucky leaned down to kiss Sam’s chest, brushed his lips feather-light against the edge of the bruise. He raised his head. ‘Is this—ah, is this OK?’

Sam looked at him, his eyes half-closed. Bucky was flushed, his scrapes and contusions and burn marks already faded to almost nothing, the powerful muscles in his chest and abdomen rising and falling with his quickening breath, his cock straining against the fabric of his briefs. And he was very, very still.

‘You’re doing great,’ Sam managed to get out, and kneaded Bucky’s upper back, loving the way it felt under his fingers, the way Bucky leaned into his touch.

Bucky grinned a little and moved his head down again to plant a row of kisses on Sam’s chest, then ran his tongue over a nipple, sucked and licked until Sam was breathing hard, eyes closed. A little part of Sam felt the icepack slip down his side and land on the mattress with a faint thud, felt all the ache of the day, but most of him had no room for anything that wasn’t Bucky’s mouth, each little flick of Bucky’s tongue.

‘How ‘bout now?’ Bucky muttered against his skin.

Sam didn’t reply, just stroked Bucky’s hair again, opened his eyes in time to see the other man shift his weight onto his knees so he could caress Sam’s stomach with his hand. Bucky’s hand was calloused from fighting, from knife hilts and gun grips, his body strong and fast enough to outrun a moving car or lift it up by its bumper. And now all of it was wrapped up in the languorous motion of his mouth towards Sam’s navel, the gentle brush of his fingers over Sam’s pecs, down his side, over the spot where his hipbone disappeared under his waistband.

 _Keep going_ , Sam wanted to say, but instead he closed his eyes again, let his head sink into the pillows, let his hand wander over the silky tangle of Bucky’s hair and the rippling muscles of his shoulders, over the spot where the absent arm felt like a missing step. Bucky licked a trail across his skin, let out a throaty moan as he nuzzled Sam’s abs. The sound made Sam’s cock harden painfully and wonderfully against the too-tight fabric of his underwear, made him grind his hips against the mattress.

‘So great,’ he managed to get out between breaths, but he was too tired for words. Bird screeches sounded out from the TV, now very far away. Bucky kept going, working him over with his mouth and his hand. He breathed on Sam’s skin, half-gasps, half-huffs that made Sam’s flesh shiver. He kissed places bruised from the explosion, licked ripples of muscle, let his mouth linger on the numb little ridge of Sam’s appendectomy scar, massaged the dimple of an old bullet wound in Sam’s left side and the trail of sparse hair in Sam’s lower belly.

Like every inch of Sam was perfect.

He opened his eyes when Bucky hooked his fingers under the waistband of his boxers and started shrugging them down Sam’s hips. His tugged very gently on Bucky’s hair, so he would look at him.

They gazed at each other. Bucky’s eyes were glassy with arousal, that soft and plump mouth of his parted invitingly. ‘OK?’ Sam sighed. Bucky nodded, brushed his cheek against Sam’s arm. He waited until Sam lifted his hips a little before he finished shimmying the boxer-briefs down Sam’s thighs.

His cock was still only half-hard, but that made no difference. Bucky leaned down to run his tongue up and down the shaft, kiss the glistening tip, run a thumb over the sensitive skin between the base of Sam’s cock and his balls.

‘God,’ Sam moaned. His breath was ragged now. He lay his head back on the pillows, closed his eyes and let Bucky take care of him, let Bucky get him to full hardness with his mouth and his fingers and his teasing tongue.

He looked again when Bucky took him inside his mouth, so he could see Bucky’s lips stretched around his cock, the sweaty flush on his face, the little motions of the metal joint and Bucky’s cheeks as he sucked and licked, unhurried, head bobbing up and down in a slow rhythm, drawing it out. Bucky stopped after a few moments, let Sam’s cock fall out of his mouth with a thread of saliva. ‘Like this?’ he moaned, fingers holding the shaft firmly and gently, then rubbed his cheek against it with a throaty, hungry gasp.

‘Buck.’ That was all Sam managed, in a whimper, as Bucky mouthed him again, deeper this time. His left hand stroked the nape of Bucky’s neck, his right hand grabbed a fistful of bedding. He let himself melt into the pillows, into the feel of Bucky’s mouth, Bucky’s fingers between his legs. He didn’t have the energy to grind his hips and buttocks against the mattress, for anything that wasn’t breathing, heavy and loud, for anything that wasn’t the sweet slide of him into Bucky, Bucky’s soft little grunts of pleasure around his throbbing cock.

He didn’t know how long it took until he came in the wet, tight heat of Bucky’s mouth, each deep spasm tearing out a half-cry, half-moan.

His breath steadied. He let go of the sheets, ran a leaden hand over his sweat-soaked forehead. When he looked down Bucky had finished swallowing, and now started licking Sam’s cock clean. Sam was still too sensitive; the light brush of Bucky’s tongue on his glans hurt, and it felt good, all at once.

‘Hope you liked that,’ Bucky said, and cupped Sam’s balls, ran a slow hand up the underside of his cock. ‘I want my best guy to enjoy himself.’

He was only half-teasing. Sam could hear the self-doubt in his voice.

‘Come here,’ Sam said, yawning with contentment.

Bucky grinned a little. ‘Sure thing, Cap.’

Sam rolled onto his side as Bucky moved up the bed, the pain in his side ebbing back but weak under the wonderful slack in his muscles.

They nestled on the pillows, face to face, eye to eye, breathing to the same rhythm. Sweat pearled the skin above Bucky’s mouth. Sam wiped it away with his thumb, drawing the motion out until Bucky blinked and let out a sigh of pleasure, then Sam edged forward for a kiss.

Bucky hesitated a little. ‘I should go drink—’

‘It’s OK. You know I like it.’

Bucky met him with his mouth then, hand first on Sam’s chest, then snaking under Sam’s neck so he could wrap his arm around Sam’s shoulders and draw him close.

Sam’s kissing was unhurried. He took the time to taste himself in Bucky’s mouth, to savour the throaty sounds they were both making, the way Bucky’s erection was pressing against his softening but still half-hard cock. His hand moved down the curve of Bucky’s back, dipped under the waistband of his briefs to tease his ass, then moved up again to pull Bucky’s undershirt up.

They broke the kiss, opened their eyes. ‘You don’t have to,’ Bucky said between two breaths.

Sam was leaden with sleepiness but he kissed Bucky’s cheek, rolled him gently onto his back. Bucky’s hand went to his undershirt, then stilled, the arousal in his face mixed with blankness. Some big part of him was waiting for permission, Sam knew, and some small part of him was waiting for punishment, pain, a blow. Sometimes that made Sam weary with grief, sometimes it made him taste a bitter and cold kind of anger, like old coffee. Right now all he could manage was a tight heat inside his chest as he held Bucky’s hand under his, until his breath steadied, then helped him shrug the shirt off, slow as anything.

He was bone-tired, wrung out from his orgasm, probably about to fall asleep on top of Bucky, but he desperately wanted this, wanted Bucky to feel nothing but good. He wanted to feel like there was only the two of them in the whole wide world.

He kissed Bucky’s cheek again, lapped a little salt off his skin, breathed in his scent, sweat and sex and soap. ‘You want me to stop?’

Bucky made a muffled noise, shook his head. ‘No,’ he gasped, voice hoarse and small. Sam hoisted himself up on his left arm, which sent a fresh jolt of pain through his chest, but he didn’t mind it so much. He slid his hand onto Bucky’s wrist, pinning it gently to the bed, his thumb brushing the faint scars left behind by years of restraints. His right hand went to Bucky’s briefs, pulled them down so slowly Bucky let out a noise of frustration that sank under Sam’s skin, went straight to the ache still lingering between his legs.

Once Bucky had kicked his underwear away, Sam ran his hand over his upper legs. ‘I love this part of you,’ Sam said as he massaged the sensitive skin over marble-hard muscle. Bucky’s thighs—Bucky’s amazing thighs—could probably bend a steel beam, but they spread like warm butter for Sam’s hand. He cupped Bucky’s cock and he let out another whiskey-and-honey moan and thrust his hips up a little. ‘And this part.’ He lay halfway over Bucky so he could kiss the flesh half of his left shoulder. ‘Mmm, and this.’

‘ _Sam_ ,’ Bucky let out as Sam settled down halfway on top of him, his right leg wrapped over Bucky’s, his fingers squeezing the base of Bucky’s cock then moving up the shaft. ‘ _Sam_.’

He made those three little letters sound like water in the desert.

Sam kissed his cheek. ‘Not going anywhere,’ he said in a tender whisper, his breath a little faster now, and his hand moved up to the slick tip of Bucky’s cock, teased it until Bucky squirmed and gasped. Soon enough he settled into a rhythm, rubbing up and down in deep and drawn-out strokes.

Bucky’s breathing turned into panting and Sam closed his eyes and leaned across him so he could kiss the ridges where Bucky’s flesh met metal, the scarred skin dry and rubbery but somehow perfect.

Bucky shuddered at this, not with pleasure. Sam lifted his head, opened his eyes, gazed into Bucky’s for a while before he leaned back down, into Bucky’s kiss on the side of his head, Bucky nuzzling his ear. His hand was still pumping Bucky’s cock. He slowed down even more, pressed his palm firm against the shaft, up and down. Bucky’s chest rose under him in a deep moan.

‘It’s OK,’ Sam said. ‘I’ve got you.’ He squeezed Bucky’s cock and kissed the scars again, his lips ghosting Bucky’s skin, brushing cold metal from time to time.

They lay like that for a while, closer than anything, until Bucky’s gasps became more desperate. His cock was burning feverishly in Sam’s hand, hard and slick and straining. Sam picked up the pace, tightened his grip until Bucky came with three hot spurts on Sam’s stomach, hip rubbing Sam’s cock and thighs as he thrust into Sam’s hand. His long, drawn-own noises sank hot and heavy into Sam’s flesh, pooled deep inside him. Sam lifted his head so he could see Bucky’s face, flushed and shiny with sweat, eyes half-closed, mouth half-open. His hand was balled into a tight fist, superhuman but staying in place just because Sam’s hand was lying on his arm.

Sam didn’t let go of his cock, just slackened his grip into a rhythmic caress, and a few moments later another orgasm rippled through Bucky, dry this time. Sam stayed halfway on top of him, sure that there couldn’t be anything better than the feel of Bucky’s body against his, the feel of Bucky’s pleasure, his pleasure, the sound of Bucky’s gasps, nearly drowning out the occasional squeak of the mattress and the faint whirr inside the metal joint.

By the time Bucky’s breathing evened and he was only letting out the occasional whimper, Sam was groggy with sleep and warmth. He struggled a little to grab some tissues off the nightstand—his rib stung, sharp-toothed—then settled back down again, propped up on his left arm.

‘Want some help?’ Bucky said in a half sigh while Sam cleaned them both up. Sam gazed at his face, drinking it in for a moment. He loved seeing Bucky like this, undone and sluggish with pleasure, hair a little tangled, looking like someone who—for a moment, at least—could let himself be. Be happy, be loved, just be. The bitter might be bitter, but sometimes the sweet was sweeter.

He took a clean tissue and dabbed at the sweat on Bucky’s face. ‘Sorry, couldn’t wait for you to finish coming. I have plans for New Year.’

Bucky opened his eyes. ‘Very funny. Besides, not my fault you’re amazing.’

‘You set a pretty high bar,’ Sam said, before he wadded up the used tissues and tossed them on the floor.

‘That’s so gross, Wilson.’ A yawn swallowed up the end of the word.

Sam yawned himself, the sort of yawn that made his jaw feel like it was going to pop. He was the good kind of tired, the best kind. ‘You still love me, though.’

‘Only because I love you an infinite amount,’ Bucky said, and put his hand on Sam’s shoulder.

‘Are we going for the infinity plus one thing like two huge assholes?’

Bucky nodded. ‘Yup.’

Sam kissed the bridge of his nose. ‘Well, then infinity plus one. Plus one of those weird numbers,’ he added before Bucky could reply. He turned serious and leaned a little more over Bucky, so he could run his fingers through his hair. ‘Always.’

Bucky’s gaze turned less glassy. ‘Sam, do you want me to do more stuff? I can—’

Sam shook his head, kept stroking Bucky’s hair. ‘I’m beat, babe. Do you—?’

‘I just want you close,’ Bucky said. His hand dipped to Sam’s waist, pulling him down, and Sam lay down fully on top of him, twinges of arousal in the places where he could feel Bucky’s slowly softening erection, Bucky’s hard nipples, the coarse-soft thatch of his pubic hair. Sweat cooled between them. He was rocked gently by Bucky’s chest, bobbing up and down with each breath, by the feel of Bucky’s body holding up his weight.

Behind him, on the television screen, a group of characters faced off against birds that seemed to have acquired the ability to spit acid, and against terrible sound editing.

Bucky held him tight for a while, then his hand traced a slow line from the small of his back to his neck before it settled on his curls, thumb and fingertips massaging his scalp. Sam cuddled Bucky’s stump, settled his head between Bucky’s left shoulder and his cheek, loved and trusted and welcomed.

***

Neither of them were fond of heat and Bucky was a living human furnace, but they held each other until the movie reached its own climax and Sam slid slowly onto his usual spot on the left side of the bed. On the TV screen, animated bird gifs made airplane diving noises as they wreaked their terrible, yet poorly composed revenge. Global warming seemed to be involved somehow.

‘I never knew eagles exploded this much,’ Bucky mumbled half into a pillow while he kneaded Sam’s waist with his knuckles. ‘Think it’s time for a new national bird?’

Sam’s chest still hurt and his muscles still ached, the pain seeping back despite the fact that his body felt like it was going to ooze right into the mattress, firm or not. He didn’t much mind any of it, though, just struggled to keep his eyes open as Bucky blinked away sleep, his eyelids bluish from the haze of the TV screen. Tomorrow, Bucky was going to wake up rested and raring to go, no matter how little sleep he got. He wasn’t going to get sick, because he never did, and he wasn’t going to age another day, because he hadn’t in the past three years.

Right now Sam didn’t much mind any of that either.

‘Nah. What could be more American than a bird that blows up?’

‘Two guys wearing the flag and they have a shield that’s stars and stripes all over. And, get this, one of them has a real kickass metal arm and the other flies around like an eagle, all majestic and everything. They’re also incredibly good-looking.’ He shifted a little as he looked back at the TV screen, enough to make the lukewarm metal on his shoulder dig pleasantly into Sam’s upper arm. ‘Just sayin’.’

Sam pretended to consider it for a moment. ‘Nope. Michael Bay birds still have the edge.’

‘You wound me, Wilson.’

Sam edged forward to kiss the side of Bucky’s face, where a dimple formed when he smiled broadly enough. Not very often. Not often enough. ‘There, all better. Besides, you’re the one who brought us this amazing piece of… art.’

Bucky gave him one of his timid looks, the kind that always looked agonisingly frail on a man who was two-fifty pounds of muscle and unbruisable skin and a shuttered mission-face. ‘You really enjoyed it?’

‘Well... I did get distracted there at one point.’

‘Mm-mm.’ He took his hand off Sam’s waist to cover up a yawn, which made Sam yawn in response, then reached for Sam’s left hand.

Sam closed his eyes. On the TV, the last bits of what could, in a broad sense, be called dialogue, gave way to a foley mishap and finally to music looped over the end credits. He felt his body cool, felt his mind try to pick away at sleep.

‘Do you think—?’ Bucky asked after a while, now serious. He didn’t need to finish. _Do you think that poor girl is going to get her transplant and be OK? Do you think those two dumb kids are going to get the book thrown at them, or is she going to get a second chance?_

_Do you think the stuff we do really makes any difference?_

Sam said nothing. Having the worst thing that could happen to you happen to you made you shed the kind of lies you wrapped around you like a comforter. He just squeezed Bucky’s hand, and Bucky squeezed his back.

It was September 19. You let someone die, like you’d done plenty of times before. You buried your child, which was worse. You had your body and your mind ripped apart and owned and chewed up and spat out. That was worse too, much worse. That went on for _years_. (He could hear Bucky’s voice, the sarcasm making the Brooklyn more pronounced. _I’ll go grab my award, then_.) But even that day could end. And then there was another day, and another, and another. Even if you didn’t really believe it.

‘I miss him,’ Sam said after a while, his voice flat. For a moment the grief was fresh again, a cold wire that could cut bone. His eyes stung, his throat filled up. Bucky nudged him onto his side with his body and spooned him, their hands still entwined, held him so close Sam was sure he could feel Bucky’s heartbeats on his back. He whispered into Sam’s neck, low enough that he could only make out the words’ shapes. _Shh. I’m here. It’s OK. It’s OK._ He took a deep breath, not caring that it made his rib ache, then another.

The first time he’d visited Riley’s mother after, Martha had taken him to her son’s old room, where the air smelled of Pinesol but a pair of busted-up sneakers had been left by the bed, untouched, untidied. An ancient magazine was still lying on the desk, the Os filled in with a black felt-tip marker. _Bet he already hoarded wet wipes back then too, the douche_ , Sam had thought, then tried to recall the funny way Riley pronounced hydraulics, and realised he no longer remembered.

‘You want to hear about him?’

‘I’d be honoured.’

Sam settled against Bucky’s chest, draped his right arm over Bucky’s, his right hand over their entwined fingers. ‘He was kind of a dick, so you’d have liked him.’

Bucky made a noise of disapproval and kneed Sam’s thigh, then nuzzled Sam’s neck again as Sam began to talk. Once in a while his thumb would caress Sam’s, his foot would gently rub Sam’s calf. Moments later Sam startled a little, sure that one of their phones was buzzing, but there was only the very faint hum of the bedside radio, the city’s night sounds. He let himself sink into Bucky’s hold on him, the words dripping slower and slower.

The phones would buzz soon enough. Soon enough there would be more people who needed them, the ones they could save, the ones they couldn’t. For now he let himself drift off to sleep, skin-to-skin with the man he loved and who loved him back, who’d been stolen away by an evil king and had found out that after you escaped the cage, the real ending was learning how to live with the curse.

For now they were both going to sleep in peace after a long day was done.

Inside the bedroom, the curtains shifted in a breeze carrying a hint of autumn coolness. A car sped down the street. And high above the haze of city air and city lights, the sky filled up with stars.

**++The End++**

[ ](http://ensign-c.livejournal.com/1184.html)

Happy Caps! _(Art by **ensign_c** , click on the pic to go to the art post.)_  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Notes:** I didn’t want to go into what happened to Steve or how the Avengers are run in this fic since the story isn’t really about that, so everyone should feel free to imagine how Bucky and Sam became Cap! Maybe Steve just retired to go paint dogs on a farm (I know nothing about farming) or something, no sads required. With the regards to the Avengers, I have assumed for the purposes of this fic that, following the fall-out from MCU!Civil War, they operate as a more street-level team with more direct public contact, as in _Captain America and the Mighty Avengers_. Again, feel free to imagine their set-up in whatever way you wish.
> 
> CA:TWS neither confirms nor denies that Sam struggled with mental health issues after the end of his deployment, though it certainly suggests it. I interpreted him as having had to cope with depression, which is what I tried to get across in this fic.
> 
> As far as I know, Microbe Week isn’t a real thing, but it should be.
> 
> Quite a few lines in this fic are adapted from the comics, like Bucky smiling and saying “Yeah. I am.” after hesitating when a little girl asks him if he’s really Captain America, “save the people first”, Sam making fun of Bucy’s terrible plans and complaining about always having to rescue his ass, Bucky trying to stop to another character by telling them that killing someone is something you can never take back, the “Hey”/”Idiot” exchange between Bucky and Sam after Sam rescues him, Bucky paying a visit to a hospitalised patient while in his Captain America outfit, Cap (in that particular case Bucky) helping out a kid in emotional crisis, and Bucky saying he wants to deserve being Cap. Sam saying “I got you” (and variations thereof) to Bucky happens quite a lot in the comics, but, uh, in a different context. Then again, it’s usually in the context of his bridal catches of Bucky, so I guess not that different.
> 
> Bucky telling himself “I didn’t want it, it wasn’t my fault” is also from the comics, where, just like in this fic, it was as effective as a chocolate teakettle.
> 
>  _You try to save everyone you can. Sometimes that doesn’t mean everybody_ is something Steve says in the D23 footage of CA:CW.
> 
> In the comics, Bucky’s dad was a soldier. In the MCU, he clearly didn’t grow up in military bases (and isn’t an orphan), so I thought making his father a firefighter would be a good equivalent.
> 
>  _Either everyone mattered or nobody mattered_ is borrowed with a little alteration from Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch novels.
> 
> Princess Ameribear isn’t a thing as far as I’m aware, but Captain Ameribear and Bucky Bear are, and I am sure Princess Ameribear would be equally delightful.
> 
> Bucky loving terrible movies is half-borrowed from comics!Bucky’s endless rants about the in-universe Cap comics and Cap serials (i.e., our 40s Cap comics and Cap serials), half due to the fact that MCU!Bucky is a Deadpan Snarker who plans outings to the science fair. Obviously this nerd is watching _Kickpuncher 3_ right now.
> 
> I have assumed that, once Bucky’s metal belongs to him, not Hydra, he learns how to attach and detach parts as needed and do at least basic maintenance, as that seems logical to me.
> 
>  _they were both going to sleep in peace after a long day was done_ comes from the lyrics of [Nina Simone’s _Feeling Good_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LR1bWhdoIXM), which is totally one of my go-to Bucky/Sam songs ~~shut up I’m not crying you’re crying~~.
> 
> If you enjoy Bucky/Sam—which I assume you do, if you’ve made it this far—I run the [WinterFalcon](https://www.imzy.com/buckysam) community on Imzy, which is aimed at all Bucky/Sam shippers (comics, MCU, etc). Feel free to check it out!
> 
> Finally, thanks again to **ensign_c** for picking this fic to illustrate and for creating amazing art (don’t forget to check it out and comment [here](http://ensign-c.livejournal.com/1184.html)), and thank you all, dear readers, for taking the time to check out this fic and for your patience throughout my uploading mishaps. Hope you’ve enjoyed the story!


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